JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE STUDIES
Year:2018 | Volume:6 | Issue:12 |Papers Count:9

The Indian subcontinent was a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire, located at the far eastern end of Achaemenid territories. It was the last part of Achaemenid lands taken over by Alexander of Macedon after his invasion. In the meantime, Chandragupta, whether after a battle or by treaty with the successor of Alexander in Asia (Seleucus I Nicator) established some degree of autonomy and founded the Mauryan dynasty. The Capital of this empire was Pataliputra. Following the archaeological excavations in this area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were some evidence indicating the influence of Persian architecture on Mauryan buildings. Dr. David Brainard Spooner who was exploring different parts of Pataliputra, suggested the Persian imprint beyond the impact of Persian architecture. By providing some etymological and field evidence, he presented the theory of “The Zoroastrian Period of Indian History”. He strongly believed that Mauryan kings were originally Persians who brought the Achaemenid legacy to India and subsequently attempted to make a copy of Persepolis in Pataliputra. However, by the evidence offered by Spooner and later excavations, the suggestion of such a broad impact seems inadequate. They only demostrate a typical influence of Persian architecture in Maurian edifices. Data was collected using library research and data analysis was done with an inductive approach.

When Qazvin was chosen as the capital of Shah Tahmasb, governmental quarters were set up there in a garden complex in an area called Zangi-abad. Following the destruction of a large part of Safavid Qazvin, little remains of those quarters. What remains along with other resources have always been used in order to restore the layout of the city and the plan of the governmental complex and its adjacent gardens. However, it seems that the information available to restore the plan of the Safavid city and the characteristics of its important components such as the avenues are insufficient. This article seeks to find out about the location and characteristics of the avenue (s) of the dar al-saltana (seat of the kingdom) of Qazvin. Upon the order of the king, ‘Abdi Bayg Shirazi, the court poet, has described the dar al-saltana including the Sa’adat garden, the palaces, avenues, and squares, in a poet. These descriptions are an important document for understanding the spaces of the new city that was built at the time of Shah Tahmasb in the northern part of Qazvin. Some Europeans who visited Qazvin have also described and depicted their observations of the Safavid royal complex in their manuscripts and drawings. Among them, Pietro Della Valle, Don Garcia de Silva Figueroa, and Engelbert Kaempfer have provided considerable information about Qazvin’s royal complex. With an interpretive and historical-descriptive research method, ‘Abdi Bayg’s description of the avenues was studied first. By identifying the spaces described in the poems and comparing their features to Kaempfer’s drawings and writings of Della Valle and Figueroa, the existence and location of the avenue (s) and their interconnections is understandable in the context of the city. Conclusively, besides the north-south, private avenue inside the garden surrounding the Urushi-Khaneh and other internal avenues, two avenues can be identified outside the private gardens: first, a semi-public avenue that connected the Ali Qapu gate to the entrance portal of the Urushi-Khaneh garden; and second, an avenue that connected the Ali Qapu gate to the city of Qazvin, reaching at its southern end to the forecourt of the Jame‘Mosque.

Almost all visitors of works of Islamic architecture agree about a special quality that touched them deep inside in the direct experience of these places. This internal experience of quality, not necessarily restricted to encounters with works of Islamic architecture, has been rarely discussed and somehow been neglected in general studies or theories of architecture. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to disambiguate this concept with reference to Islamic mysticism, and then explain it in the architectural discourse. In this way, it can be stated that a work of architecture, like all natural and artificial phenomena in the cosmos, is a being of multiple ranks of existence. According to the doctrine of levels of existence (maratib al-wujud), place is an essence that corresponds to rank among levels. The quality and quantity (forma and materia) of place are two complementary aspects of its exterior existence, representing its essential rank. The main point is that between the two exterior aspects of place, quality is higher in rank than quantity, and it is affected by and directly related to its essence. Therefore, we can acknowledge that the deep effect felt in the presence of Islamic architectural works is primarily because of the living essence of these places that would permeate the visitors through the multiple levels of the quality of that place.

Since ancient times, all schools of thought and different people and societies have introduced characteristics of the best living place (environment or space) for humans. These were introduced by philosophers and thinkers in different societies. In the contemporary era, because of the physical expansion of cities as a result of the development of transportation systems in addition to the growth of tourism, city environments and especially their public domains demand specific characteristics. The main goal of this research is to introduce and explain “features of the best urban public realm.” Analytical reasoning is the main research method used to answer this question. The main characteristics of the good public realm are derived from that part of human needs which is present in public spaces. These human needs can be categorized into three groups, namely spiritual, mental, and physiological. These are corresponding to the three dimensions of human life, those which are mentioned by different religions and schools of thought. Since this research is done in Iran, these human dimensions inevitably derive from Islamic beliefs.

Mashhad is a city with many historical neighborhoods which were once home to some valuable houses. However, change of lifestyle, development plans, migration and economic changes modified a great part of the valuable urban fabric. The introduction and recognition of houses in Mashhad as a historical city is both essential and important aside from the positive or negative effects of these changes. In this article, it is attempted to explore the possibility of typological categorization of Mashhad's historical houses. The concepts of "typology" and "housing" were examined and reviewed based on documents, upon which the residential history and architectural features of the residential fabric of the city’s historical core were studied. Furthermore, formal characteristics and orientations of residential units influenced by climatic conditions were considered, and a number of historical houses were examined based on their time of construction, their physical elements, and architectural components. The results of this study enable the distinction and categorization of historical houses based on their formal features, for example, the form of the entrance portal, vestibule, hallway, courtyard, and iwan, or the mode of interior and exterior facade decorations. The three residential types include two Qajar-era types (first-half and second-half) with an introvert architecture, and a third type of the Pahlavi I era with an extrovert architecture. These types are expressive of their time conditions and transformations of Iranian architectural paradigms under influence of Western architecture, as well as socio-cultural transformations in the Iranian society.

Building permits and approved architectural drawings are parts of a construction process in residential environments. This process affects residents in numerous ways. Investigation of these effects requires recording the perception of residents over time. On the other hand, the mechanism of guiding the residents’ experience of gradual physical change requires a model that would integrate with the objective process and would exhibit the residential environment at any time. Due to the complexity of elements and processes of change in the physical environment involving emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions, the conceptual framework of the present study is proposed based on Jack Nasar’s model of environmental response in order to collect evaluative responses, and on the adaptive cycle model of Holling and Gunderson to identify the process of non-hierarchical perception of physical change by residents. The research was carried out with a qualitative grounded theory approach. The in-depth interview questions within the proposed model were used to collect the opinions of 18 residents of two neighborhoods of Hemmat-abad and Sadat in Babolsar. The respondents were selected using snowball sampling, and the adequacy of the sample size was determined by theoretical saturation. Concepts, categories, and major categories were extracted by coding, and grounded theory models were developed according to conditions, interactions, and consequences of categories. The results show that residents develop indicators for the emotional evaluation of physical changes over time. Focus on the dynamic nature of change, shift in the narrative in relation to economic incentives, lack of physical continuity in the past and present, and adjustment of the level of adaptation by internalizing external factors were the main observed themes during the four stages of abandonment, destruction, construction and operation, respectively. Adoption and implementation of criteria such as sustaining the concept of dwelling, reference patterns and mental environmental standards in the process of change by both builders and residents can reduce the damage caused by the lack of guidance documents to control the construction cycles in residential neighborhoods.

This paper provides answers to one of the most commonly asked questions in architectural education, which is about the lack of coherence resulting in the separation of theory and practice in architecture, by exploring philosophical concepts and assumptions. A look into Aristotle’s views about practice and theory reveals a new meaning of “practice, "dimensions of which have been beautifully demonstrated in the concept of “phronesis” or practical wisdom. Gadamer’s analysis of phronesis shows the importance of his view in understanding the relation of the universal and the particular, ergo the relation of theory and practice. Understanding practice as a concept that relies on deliberation and decision corrects our assumption of practice as the mere application of theoretical knowledge, and makes the particular situations in which we, architects, need to make deliberation and decision, a critical point to seek “the relation of theory and practice.” A deep understanding of dynamic situations in the architectural profession suggests that we need an alternate definition for theory, practice, and their relation. If we insist on the familiar meanings of practice and theory and on the application of theoretical knowledge, we can never bridge theory and practice. However, if we deeply understand the dialectics between theory and practice and between the universal and the particular that exists in moments of deliberation and decision, we can finally say that we have filled the fracture between theory and practice.