The Plasco Building rose above the Tehran skyline in 1962 as a symbol of a nation in transformation. Built by Habib Elghanian, one of Iran's most prominent Jewish businessmen, the structure took its name from his plastics company and represented both his personal fortune and the broader modernizing ambitions of the era. At the time of its construction, it was the tallest building in Iran — a gleaming embodiment of the rapid development taking place under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. For Tehranis, it became an unmistakable landmark, its silhouette familiar to everyone who knew the city.
The building stood twenty stories in total, with fifteen floors above ground and five below. Over the decades it evolved from a symbol of modernity into a complex urban organism, housing a major shopping center on its ground floor, a restaurant on the upper floor, and dozens of clothing workshops spread throughout its intermediate levels. Garment workers, shop owners, and residents occupied its spaces for generations, making the Plasco not merely an architectural landmark but a living community embedded in the fabric of Tehran's commercial life.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution transformed the building's ownership as completely as it transformed the country. Habib Elghanian, the building's founder, was executed by the new Islamic government in 1979 — an early and shocking indication of the revolution's treatment of Iran's Jewish community and of wealthy figures associated with the old regime. The Plasco Building was seized by the state and handed to the Mostazafan Foundation, an organization controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. For nearly four decades, the foundation operated the building while its original owner's fate served as a grim reminder of revolutionary violence.
On 19 January 2017, at approximately 07:50 local time, fire broke out on the ninth floor of the building. Ten fire brigades responded to the blaze, which had taken hold in an area filled with flammable textiles from the clothing workshops. Firefighters battled the flames for hours as officials assured the public that the building had been evacuated. The scene attracted onlookers, journalists, and television cameras — Iran's state-run Press TV was filming the firefighting efforts as the crisis unfolded.
Then, without warning, the north wall collapsed. The rest of the building followed within moments in a catastrophic progressive collapse. Several firefighters were inside when the wall fell; some managed to escape before the structure came down entirely, but others were on elevated aerial platforms that toppled during the collapse. The entire sequence was captured on camera, making it one of the most dramatic building collapses ever recorded on live television.
The human cost was devastating. Twenty firefighters were killed. At least 70 others were injured, with 23 taken to local hospitals suffering severe injuries. The building collapsed primarily downward rather than outward, which limited damage to neighboring structures but contributed to the difficulty of rescue operations. Over the following nine days, recovery teams assisted by military personnel worked through the debris. The remains of 15 firefighters were eventually recovered. Tens of thousands of Iranians, including senior government officials, attended a funeral ceremony held at Tehran's Grand Mosalla. The fallen firefighters were buried in a section of the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery reserved for martyrs. Ayatollah Khamenei eulogized them in a public message, calling them heroes and shaheeds.
The collapse triggered an intense public reckoning with issues of building safety, institutional negligence, and governmental accountability. Tehran's municipality under Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf came under fierce criticism: commentators pointed to insufficient fire department funding, inadequate safety warnings, slow crisis response, and a prioritization of debris removal over the possibility of finding survivors. The Mostazafan Foundation initially declined to make a public statement, then apologized four days after the collapse on 23 January 2017, though it carefully added that the foundation was not a member of the board responsible for the building's affairs — a formulation widely interpreted as an attempt to deflect responsibility.
Construction of a new Plasco Building on the same site began in 2018 and was completed in 2021. The new structure, also twenty stories, incorporates the five underground floors of the original. The collapse of the original Plasco remains one of the deadliest structural failures in modern Iranian history and a landmark moment in Iranian debates about urban safety, institutional accountability, and the legacy of properties seized after the revolution.
