HOVIATESHAHR
Year:2014 | Volume:7 | Issue:16|Papers Count:10

The achievement of a sustainable practice of everyday urban life is directly linked to the urban landscape, beauty, and creative potential of its desirable spaces. Visual elements of urban landscape not only present aesthetical values but also verify the mutual relationships of these values in cultural, economic, and biological dimensions. Urban landscape is in an urban environment to meet the man-made environment on the natural environment in the material and spiritual aspects of the landscape needs. Urban landscape affects people's lives, psychological and rational arrangement of the public spaces to meet the people's needs, from the psychological and aesthetic demands of the city, to create the necessary environment. Urban landscape is a living system, that a complex assembly of flows, structures, connections, and owners form it. In order to have a safe, convenient, and beautiful urban environment we should fundamentally consider the aesthetics aspect of urban landscape. A desirable urban landscape would be accomplished when the shape, scale, and beauties of the buildings, which are participant in creation of this urban landscape, are being lauded. In addition, untimely changes in urban landscape and destruction of worthy of remarkable and memorable buildings should be prevented. In fact, a desirable urban landscape deserves something more than not only apartment complexes and non-built spaces, but also traditional and vernacular senses. The urban landscape could be called beautiful, when it gives the chance of living in an emotional, well ordered, peaceful, calm, and dreamful city to the people. When one passes through a city with beautiful urban landscape, his/her eyes will give him/her a satisfactory sight of buildings with their harmonic lines and pleasant outlooks. The beautiful urban landscape will not excite the fear, presentiment, and anxiety. It is mixed with natural theme and its well- configured ratio of natural spaces and buildings, provokes people to pass through city. The objective of this paper is to investigate the features and qualities of urban landscape, definition of aesthetics standards in urban landscape, categorizing the aesthetics theories of the urban landscape and eventually to introduce the elements and qualities of a beautiful urban landscape. The findings of this study show that the urban landscape is the perceptible or visible aspect of the environment, which has its own form, function, meaning, and particularly beauty. This study is an attempt to demonstrate the principles of a beautiful urban landscape in a chart with the following sections:Qualitative aspects of the elements which are used in creation of beautiful urban landscape;Qualitative aspects of correlation between the elements of beautiful urban landscape;Qualitative aspects of the elements which are used in creation of beautiful urban landscape in relation with urban context.This paper aims to show that the standards of aesthetics in urban landscape are completely dynamic, varied, comparative, and changeable. In addition, it demonstrates the connection between environmental meanings and urban aesthetics and introduces the variables like visual enrichment, lighting, sense of place and spatial opening as basic elements of beautiful and meaningful urban landscape.

In order to be able to study Saint Thaddeos Monastery, which is one of the Armenian Monasteries in Iran, we should first have a short look at Armenian Church architecture and its history as the required base for our investigation. So we briefly present Armenian architecture and Armenian church architecture at the beginning. We also study the origins of this architecture and the specialties related to our case study. According to some historians, after many temples had been torn down churches were built on their wall foundations, preserving both shrine’s rectangular shape and overall dimensions, the only difference being that the alters were moved from west to east. As for the newly built churches, erected in a hurry, they were bound to resemble pre-Christian temples, from which they were converted or built in their place. In addition the existence of a pre-Christian temple in the place of some early Armenian Churches is possible based on some historical references or archeological studies.Afterwards we study the Saint Thaddeus Monastery, its history and architecture. We see that in some references of this complex, a hypothesis of possible relation between this church and a pre-Christian temple is proposed. Afterwards we classify all the references based on their opinion of this hypothesis. We extract and analyze the evidences mentioned in all of them.We study the old church of Saint Thaddeus Monastery, which is the part related to the temple hypothesis, historically and architecturally in details. In this study it is specified that the old church in its plan belongs to 10th to 11th centuries and a group of Armenian Churches called Vasporakan School. This group come from a type called Domed Hall, which in its turn relate to Basilican churches and has became common in Armenia from 6th and 7th centuries. This group of churches are shorter than the first type in hall dimensions, only have one pair of wall-pylons in plan and date 10th and 11th centuries.In facades’ design this church belongs to 17th century and Nakhijevan School. The use of dark and light rows of stones in the dome base, polychromic design in facades, extension of window ornaments in façade surface, mosaic patterns and linear ornaments are the main specialties of this type.In this research, which is associated with an illustrated comparison of examples, relationship of all the evidences with a pre-Christian temple is rejected. These evidences which include plan dimensions, its extension, alter dimensions and also facade decorations, stone dimensions, and cross and stars ornaments all belong to Armenian Christian Culture and are similar to the other examples, especially with the ones in the same period and region. According to the rejection of all temple-related hypothesis evidences and detailed studies of this church, in the context of Armenian Church architecture, and provided that no new archeological evidences is proposed, this hypothesis is rejected for any kind of relationship including function convert, being settled on the remains and being established in the place of any type of pre-Christian temple.

Throughout the history particularly in recent years, extent theoretical revolution and development has been seen in urban design. In this situation, every new theory defines its specific values and norms to have a correct and appropriate relation to the system of theories. An important point about all of these is their dependency on philosophical and intellectual resources at one side and at the other side, relatively, their attention to the cultural backgrounds- which has affected the theories directly or indirectly. According to this, the research gets different approach to the issue of urban design and tries to explain different theoretical basis rather than modern studies. In this approach, holy Quran’s guidance as a global book would be a comprehensive reference which can present main directions and define important strategies. So this research emphasized on holy Quran’s guidance, studies the creature-as a complete and perfect existence-then concludes that “beauty” and its most important cause “unity” is the constant and dominant quality in the creature and the act of God. Every system in the creature is created in such a way that unity is its prominent characteristic and this brings quality of beauty to the creature and existence. On this basis, the research calls human which is the successor and the caliph of god on the earth to follow the quality of God’s method in practice and thought realm. It means that human should direct his practice and thought in process of urban design according to the principles that form unity, because he is God’s caliph and should follow him. In conceptual review, the research defines unity as “an organization of details in a way which they form a harmonic and one-targeted whole”. In continue and for defining the concept more clearly, it expresses that unity could be achieved by creating harmony in the “causing system”, “effected system” and also “inner system” according to Quran teachings. Then in interpretation of this concept into urban design, offers the ultra-principle of “spatial unity” as a dominant principle in urban design realm. The text of this principle expressed so: “every produced space should first be born from the existing (causing system) spatial unity, second be harmonic itself (inner system), and third should cause creation of unity and harmony in the new spatial organization (effected system)“. In continue, it describe this ultra-principle as a concept which consists of unity sub principles, multiplicity sub principles and the sub principles display the combination of these two. First group of principles includes “spatial continuity”, “centrality” and “simplicity” that are direct interpretations of “spatial unity” ultra-principle. These sub principles shows the uniformity dimension of ultra-principle. Second group includes “spatial divergence”, “distribution” and “complexity” that present the ultra-principle indirectly. These ones express diversity and multiplicity dimension of spatial unity. Third group of sub principles covers “spatial hierarchy” and “equivalence” which are the most rich sub principles that manifest “spatial unity” ultra-principle and synthetize previous groups. These two principles are combination of uniformity dimension and diversity and multiplicity dimension of spatial unity.

Lahijan vernacular settlement which is called “shikili” houses, located in northern Iran, can be imagined as a living organism which is the outcome of centuries of optimization of material use, construction techniques and climate considerations. The vernacular and traditional buildings in every area are a product of the accumulated experience and practice of many centuries and can constitute a continuous source of knowledge. The use of local materials and the harmonization with the local environment and climate are some of the factors, which contribute to the distinct architectural identity of every area.This is the main reason why various researchers have examined traditional and vernacular buildings throughout the world with respect to bioclimatic and environmental architecture. Bioclimatic design employs appropriate technologies and design principles based on a scholarly approach to climate and environment. This very type of designing is concerned with the layout of the building orientation in relation to the sun and the wind, aspect ratio), the spacing (site planning), the air movement, the openings (size–position, protection), and the building envelope (walls: construction materials-thickness, roof construction detailing). The vernacular architecture of Lahijan may be defined as bioclimatic since, it can be argued, the traditional builders of Lahijan understood bioclimatic concepts. These researches deal with the subject of the environmental performance of traditional architecture in two different ways: qualitatively and quantitatively. This study focuses on the villages of Lahijan, in an attempt to detect, document and analyse the design principles and the elements of its traditional architecture of the 20th century. It should be noted that the term “traditional” is preferred over the commonly-used term “vernacular” because the buildings in question form part of an architecture, which was not spontaneously constructed by its inhabitants according to their needs, but was instead built by master-builders using specific draft drawings and model plans. Rapoport uses the term “pre-industrial vernacular” to describe this category of buildings identifying it with the term “traditional”.The study is mainly based on a large-scale in situ research, which included the documentation of (26) vernacular wooden buildings. These building are actually the only ones that remain from the period of the 20th century. From this research, data concerning the typology, the form, the materials and the construction techniques of the buildings are presented. Bibliographic research is also used for the presentation of the general data of the study area (geographic location, climate, topography, ground composition, historical data), which, due to the restricted size of the paper, are briefly presented.First, the different aspects of the vernacular architecture, namely the typology, Site planning, Construction materials and techniques, are analysed. After that, the design variables proposed by Mahoney as the ones that promote the creation of buildings responsive to the climate such as Layout, Spacing, Air movement, Openings, Building envelope, are analysed in the corresponding paragraphs. Finally, conclusions are drawn in order to outline the design principles, which characterized this architecture and can be integrated to the refurbishment of existing buildings or the design of new ones in traditional surroundings.

Qajar dynasty is one of the Iranian royal families. A number of seven Qajar kings ruled Iran for 13 decades from 1796 to 1925. In this era, Iran witnessed new evolutions and changes. Qajar architecture constitutes an important part of Iran’s history of architecture. The importance arises from the fact that while evolution in the body of buildings was occring slowly in the course of history, it accelerated during the Qajar era that lasted for one hundred thirty years so that outstanding qualitative and quantitative evolutions are clearly distinguishable in Qajar houses. Changes in Iranian taste due to the introduction of modernity into Iranian society and admixture of European culture to Iranian-Islamic culture may account for these evolutions. As to the architecture and urbanization, the general charactrisitcs of this era may include abundant construction of new buildings and urban spaces, structural changes in old-style cities, evolution in some properties of old buildings, admixture of Eurpean architecture to Iranian styles, increased construction speed and consequent quality suffer as well as variation or deterioration of customers’ tastes. Though this era is typically charactrized by governmental attempts to make urban space changes, build public and governmental places and construct new, unprecedented buildings, a great spectrum of structural and body evolutions are also observable in the architecture of houses that were ordered to architects by lay people. As one of the prominent cities in Qajar era, Gorgan hosted the origin of Qajar family. A glance at Gorgan in Qajar era shows that the development of the city was not only dependent on its natural environment and position along the Silk Road but also on the political orientation of Qajar kings and their foreign policy toward Russia. In fact, the city and its rulers may be said to have played a significant role in regulating political and economic relations with their powerful northern neighbor. In this era, great attempts were made to construct governmental buildings and to maintain the existing ones. The majority of current historic buildings in Gorgan was built and underwent body evolutions in Qajar era. The present study aims to investigate the body evolutions of Gorgan houses in Qajar era and to seek the causes of these evolutions. The study also purports to address both the architecture of the buildings and historical-social transformations to account for these body evolutions. The study adopts a historical interpretative method addressing the evidence from both inside and outside the building. The results showed that body evolutions in Gorgan historical houses were more prominent in terms of the quality of construction in the context, extrovert orientation and hierarchical mobility from outside into inside the buildings while the evolutions were not significant in construction techniques, materials and relation to the nature. The results also revealed that the architecture of Qajar houses in various stages of the era were associated with people’s lifestyle, social milieu, economic factors, technology, beliefs and tastes of the time. Each one of these factors influenced the creation of houses consistent with form, scale and proportions.

For few decades, the population of cities in developing countries, including Iran had a higher growth rate than the total growth rate of countries’ population. The cities in the developing countries have become areas of very high vulnerability to Human hazards such as Crimes. Analysis of crime prevention by using statistical data has a crucial role in the urban studies and urban planning. Based on studying type urban crime can be measured by different models. While in developed countries, the development of the big cities began centuries ago and generally allows for controlled and planned urban crime, and the opposite is the case in developing countries, where rapid urbanization' s process is characterized by an unplanned urban crime. This research has aimed to achieve a crime prevention model (and survey the effect of it on the YazdBossinessCenters. This research is based on the CPTED model based and documentary in the way of data collecting. Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, CPTED, is based on the idea that the proper design and effective use of the built environment can lead to a reduction in the incidence and fear of crime, and an improvement in the quality of life. In other words, if a site is laid out well, the likelihood of it being targeted for a crime may be reduced. Crime Prevention is defined as the anticipation, recognition and appraisal of a crime risk and the initiation of some action to remove or reduce it. CPTED takes crime prevention one step further by studying the site design and working with the development community and public development agencies in an attempt to create safer designs in new and existing developments. Research has shown that the proper design and effective use of the Business Centers can lead to a reduction in both the opportunity for crime and fear of crime. Through their involvement in design and construction, architects, planners and builders can influence the creation of safer Business Centers. Given the fundamental importance of the mass effect on the costs of urban life, urban designers had been marginal role in the prevention of crime. Approach based on the CPTED, on Focus be given issues such as crime prevention, crime control. The results have showed that, in the survey of urban crimes, the relation between land use, and population density should be considered also CPTED approach in data normalization is one of the best approaches for solving this problem. The greatest coefficients of crime prevention are land use, and population density. CPTED strategies rely upon the ability to influence offender decisions that precede criminal acts. Research into criminal behavior shows that the decision to offend or not to offend is more influenced by cues to the perceived risk of being caught than by cues to reward or ease of entry. Consistent with this research, CPTED based strategies emphasis enhancing the perceived risk of detection and apprehension.Natural surveillance and access control strategies limit the opportunity for crime. Territorial reinforcement promotes social control through a variety of measures.

Nowadays, the concept of citizens’ security and the ways to enhance it is one of the basic priorities among urban theorists and professionals. Improving the quality of urban public spaces is necessary, especially from security viewpoint, for social capital and reinforcing the society. Thus public space of the street is enumerated as a huge capacity in response to social needs of human and providing necessary opportunities in the field of her/his social experiences in urban societies. Nowadays it is believed that positive and high quality of life in streets and open spaces is important for society; which provides opportunities for people to enjoy social interactions.Nowadays in the cities, streets have lost their former important role in cultural and social interactions. One of the major factors affecting this is the role of spatial and perceptual qualities. Thus the lack of attention to these factors leads to the absence of a sense of security in pedestrians. Considering all these issues, this research seeks to answer the following questions: what is the role of perceptual and spatial organization of street in security feeling of pedestrians? Which of them has a more effective role? Which of its indicators and their roles are stronger? Thereby it becomes relatively clear that the architects and urban designers on street design with emphasis on the issue of security feeling should pay more attention to which spatial and perceptual factors of street.This paper is investigating the effective factors on security, the relationship between security and physical space, and is setting it in current life in street spaces. In other words, this research is tries to show some kinds of security that are directly influenced by the physical space and are effective in security perception.The present study emphasizes on the importance of street and security feeling, seeking for the recognition of perceptual and spatial organization qualities of street and their role in the security feeling of pedestrians. Surveys and comparative methods of research methodology was carried out at three street cases in Tabriz city, which were selected as targeted types in terms of their difference in age, structural and spatial qualities, and activity and function types. Variety of samples has provided the analysis and generalization for various city streets. The results show that, besides existing significant correlations between spatial and perceptual organization factors, the spatial organization holds a stronger role and, among its indicators, space resolution, and among the indicators of the perceptual factors, legibility and street properties, have the greatest role in the security feeling of pedestrians.At first, the theoretical structure of the research is devoted to recognizing the meaning of security and effective factors on security feeling, and then the urban security is discussed from viewpoint of Islamic texts and Western theorists. Security discussion is followed at physical dimension and concluded by recommendations on spatial and perceptual structure in street context with the methods and research findings on the optimization of spatial and perceptual organization of street to promote security feeling of pedestrians.

Urban communities Revitalizing and strengthen of the three dimensions of sustainability, is one of the main strategies to achieve urban sustainability. A sustainable neighborhood need its users to achieve vitality and life quality. So far the main focus of the organization, improvement or reconstruction urban areas plans in Iran, were mostly concentrated around the physical renewal of the urban patterns and residents of this communities, as the main targets, have been completely ignored.Actualizing of the Sustainable Development can also be possible in the form of neighborhood development when we talk about the neighborhood as a live cell. Consequently, having a sustainable city requires the sustainable internal particles, i.e. sustainable urban zones whose general principles are foresight, environment, equality, and cooperation and complementary features are its consequence such as balance, density and optimized compression, combination of uses and social classes, public transportation, access to green space, locality, and cooperation between city and neighborhood.Due to citizens disregarding role, their culture and social customs, the plans which are not adapted to life style of residents will be prepared, even if the plans were applicable, they will leed to widespread residents discontent. Now the question is “Why public spaces does not design concerning with people participations to diminish such feedbacks? What is the administrative problems of such projects, especially in Iran.In this regard, Baghshah community as a case study in Shiraz has been chosen. Research methods is descriptive– analytic by field survey and asking people by filling the questionnaire and concentrate on social, demographic, physical surveying and analyzing the communities resident's image.Considering the theoretical framework and criteria; an important point became clear that several factors causes to the unwillingness of residents participations in the urban fabric plans.The results shows that Only 30 percent of residents has a willingness to participate in the urban project and participate in the team work plans. 2% to 30% of these enthusiastic participation, report that they will participate in financial participation and the rest of them, agree to physical participation. So the Results shows the unwillingness of residents to participation in the plans.Factors that led to unwillingness to participation in the development and organization of communities residents is as follows:1) the lack of successful experience in this field in Iran2) failure to provide necessary training to participation in matters before any local action by relevant organizations3) lack of trust of residents to plans and programs set by those involved in urban issues4) failure to ensure people that the participation of residents and between residents and municipal projects in the same proportion of the profits to be divided.Generally The purpose of this research is study on the interested of Baghshah community residents in the preparation and implementation of improvements and upgrading the quality of life of residents in this context to suggesting guidelines to attracting citizen participation, as one of the most important requirements for achieving a sustainable neighborhood and social sustainability of neighborhoods in each city.