Soffeh
Year:2018 | Volume:28 | Issue:80 |Papers Count:10

The teaching of architecture has historically undergone a variety of developments and is currently based on university systems. Many experts have found design courses as the core of the curriculum. Being learners’ first experience, Design Studio I is particularly important in this respect. The one-to-one teaching system, together with the concept of doing as learning have made individual differences important in this system. It is aimed here to scrutinise this importance on one hand, and revisit theories of temperament in this regard and investigate how they can be put into use to assess performance in this course on the other. To do this the status of the course is investigated in the official national curriculum, followed by a closer case study on the University of Kashan. Using statistical analyses of student performance in the course, temperamental differences are studied. These analyses are based on design research theories. The research confirmed the special status of Design Studio I: firstly because of the need to pay special attention to learners’ characteristics, and secondly because of its relevance for the studies regarding the relation between learners’ individual differences and their performance. Employing fresh views on temperamental characteristics of students, it is concluded that the warmer and wetter the temperament, the better the performance.

Since the 1980s, health and life expectancy have been recognised as national development indicators, with health being defined in a broad sense including aspects relating to interactions with the environment. Despite this growing attitude, architects and planners still neglect mental needs od users. The lack of environments responsive to neuro-psychological needs, particularly in residential and healthcare sectors has resulted in diminished levels of attention to environmental wellbeing. Among the aims of the present paper are achieving qualitative improvement of living spaces and increasing efficiency and responsiveness of physical environments to users’ mental needs using neuroscience. The research method is descriptive-analytic based on a review study and inductive qualitative content analysis. The findings are based on three concepts: ‘architectural experience; intrinsic selfconsciousness’, ‘sensory-based architecture, cognitive and emotional neuropsychiatric responsiveness’, and ‘multi-sensorial architecture as a treatment’. The new paradigm of neuropsychological architecture, therefore, will transform architecture. Neuro-centric architecture in conjunction with neuroscience, and behavioural and emotional sciences will play a key role to respond to psychological needs, and development of environmental health, in defining the concept of responsive environment and human-centric, health-centric architecture in response to mental needs in order to develop environmental health.

With present-day developments in the humanities and technology, many human-related concepts are undergoing radical redefinitions. Significant among them are new definitions and views regarding the contemporary museum, including the cherishing of the audience, the museum’s taking up of effective educational roles, and the museum’s research and dissemination, on top of the original tasks of collection and display of works. However, despite the rise of museums into social institutions some museums remain unaffected by developments, which is the case with some Iranian museums as they remain inert, occasionally mimicking Western galleries without considering their functioning and supporting structures. They do not appear to have any significant commitments to society or even their audience. This prompted the author to have a second look on the matter trying to establish the main influences, and that bearing in mind historical developments of museums, what can affect the formation of museum bodies and their contents, and how are audiences cherished? The research method is simultaneously descriptive and analytical using written literature on one hand and interviews with designers and researching curators on the other, to achieve as much transparency and depth as possible in dealing with the questions of this research. The paper is in three parts starting with identity of the museum and followed with its content and then its physicality and its variations. The audience is also scrutinised under the above categories. It concludes arguing for the necessity of revisiting museum formation roots, its definitions and evolution of its vital duties as a social institution, and the necessity of paying attention to museum’s architectural and content design to safeguard the presence of the audience. It also calls for a reference programme to regulate the formation of the museum’s content and body, and interactions between designers and curators in all stages from establishing its ontologies, to its scenarios and its design and implementation procedures.

Any citizen has rights, and the Islamic city citizen is no exception. The present paper is written as a prologue to ‘limbs’ rights’, which is part of the Islamic city citizen’s ‘natural rights’, with reference to Imam Sajad’s (p. b. u. h) Rights Prescript. Due to the wide scope of ‘limbs’ rights’, the present paper focuses on ‘ ‘eye’s right’ as one of the limbs, to seek its practicability in the country’s architectural and urban systems. The image of the Islamic city should not only be responsive to the right to see or observe, but also a ground for resplendence. The contribution of the city to the eye’s right is through urban image, and this image is in turn created through an orderly relation between ‘the right to resplendence’ and ‘the right to observe’. Islamic teachings on respecting the right to resplendence and observe are, therefore, the basis for mandates and rights regarding the image of the Islamic city in the present text. It should be mentioned that acquiring the right to resplendence and observe will not be possible without paying due attention to the right to full reclaim (‘estifa’, or taking maximal advantage of someone or something) and full enjoyment (‘tamatoe’, or taking maximal advantage of someone or something based on certain limits and conditions) (Katouzian 2002). How, where, and to what extent the right to resplendence and observe arises and manifests itself depends on its limits as defined based on the right to ‘estifa’ and ‘tamatoe’. Success in creating such urban rights will have positive effects not only on the city’s physicality, but also on its social, cultural … relations.

The importance of people-produced sociable spaces as opposed to planned and design spaces such as parks and café s, is manifest in the opportunities the former offer for socialising and responding to a wide range of people’s needs. Using demographic qualitative methods, the present research identifies sociable spaces, bringing together urban sociology and urban design to describe the built environment’s physical characteristics and facilitating socialising moods in people’s everyday life. Due to its bonds with people’s everyday life, Guisha High Street is chosen as the case to study a wide range of social behaviours and moods. Research data is initially collected through field observations, behavioural mapping, shared observations, and then through deep group interviews in four groups of five people and 10 individual interviews. Descriptive analyses of the findings indicate that sociable spaces are formed on edges, thresholds, and urban amenities. The production of these spaces through people’s discovery and appropriation is interpreted based on five themes: being in the district centre, searching the environment, creative strategies, normative suspension, and pleasures of socialisation.

In recent years, the policy of attracting population to border areas and strengthening the security of these areas by residents has been adopted by the Government. Located in the west Iranian Kermanshah province, Ghasr-e Shirin county is one of the areas earmarked for the implementation of this policy. Planning the development of this county faces complexities, conflicts and uncertainties, which must be taken into account in order to adapt the plan to realities and appropriately implement it. The Strategic Choice approach, makes it possible to manage complexities, conflicts and uncertainties in the decision-making process and its product in a balanced position. It is done through the application of simple and clear techniques in a cyclic process including four modes of configuration, design, comparison and choice. Bearing in mind the tendency of recent Iranian urban and regional planning system towards strategic planning, and thereby neglecting complexities, conflicts and uncertainties in mainstream plans, the strategic choice approach is adopted here as a methodology to plan the development of Ghasr-e Shirin border county, with its mainly qualitative techniques employed based on scientific, logical methods. This research intends to show how complexities, conflicts and uncertainties are managed in planning the development of Ghasr-e Shirin county. The areas concerning each of these issues have been identified at specific stages and in the decision-making process, as well as in designing the progress package as the end product. Balances have been struck according to the problem situation. Facing the complexities of the decision-making process, a more elaborate, narrowly focused approach is adopted as opposed to a simplistic treatment less focused alternative; and in the end product, a sequence of slow and steady steps has been designed according to the decision links. In order to manage the conflicts in the management of process and product, a more interactive treatment has been preferred to a more reactive treatment, with the uncertainties managed through the acceptance or reduction of uncertainties based on the flexibility of the decision-making process.

To achieve an accurate understanding of a certain architecture, one needs to equally focus on explicit and implicit aspects of it, and this, in turn, requires the study of both a building’s physicality and the life lived in it. This applies to the concept of home which, as people’s main living space has more than physicality to it: it accommodates various layers of meaning, and results in an experiential-abstract blend of time and place. The accurate understanding of the home, therefore, is more than a physical understanding. Such concepts have been explored by a variety of researchers in different cultures. The present paper attempts to focus on historic houses of Sanandaj, offering a reading that goes beyond the physical and into local living culture. The research adopts a qualitative approach on three levels: on one hand there is an analysis of the town’s general characteristics and its effects on houses, as well as an analytic-descriptive comparison between some examples, and on the other hand there is an analysis based on compatibilities of local living culture and architecture of local homes through and analysis of deep, semi-structured interviews. The results show that the main distinct features of Sanandaj homes are their relation with nature, the attention paid to exterior views whilst keeping privacy, their spatial hierarchies globally and in details, and the influence of authorities’ residences on them.