Architectural Space

This s tudy reviewed the effectiveness of architectural space design for healing and humanization in Lagos University Teaching Hospital, (LUTH), Nigeria. The s tudy adopted a semi-s tructured interview and physical appraisal of the selected major departments within the s tudy area. Also, a literature review of pas t s tudies on hospital buildings was done to buttress and advocate for the importance of architectural spaces design for healing and humanization of the users in the hospital environment. Factors of architectural space design in hospital buildings were identified and classified through the literature of pas t s tudies and a conceptual framework was developed through it. These factors were categorized under the following headings. This includes functional design factors (FDF), aes thesis design factors (ADF), environmental design factors (EDF), security & safety design factors (SSDF), and Physiological & Psychosocial design factors (PPDF). The s tudy provides information on the importance of architectural space design on overall hospital performance. This s tudy contributes to methods of evaluating architectural space design quality in hospital buildings in Nigeria and a similar context. 

Defining space by dividing it to inside and outside is one of human’s ways to recognize his position in environment. Architecture is created to response to this need for inside/outside spaces. Design of inside and outside Spaces and relation between them always has been one of necessities for definition and limitation of human living spaces, but little attention to relation of this two spatial realms and poor design of transitional spaces between them has caused to lack of quality in current Iranian architecture. This study aims to explore relation of inside and outside in architecture and focus on condition of transition, boundary and connection of those. For achieving this purpose concept of inside, outside and in-between has been investigated and by exploring cases of this kind of connection (especially in past and recent Iranian architecture), the aims, approaches, functions and physical forms of in-between spaces has been presented. This results and findings can enhance design considerations of in-between spaces especially in architecture of Iran’s big cities. Literature reviewed has shown importance of in-between space design as another kind of space: either inside and outside, neither one of them.

Utopian thoughts have precedence as old as human history. Islamic civilization utopian thought owes its progress to the Farabi&rsquos utopian concept and expansion and academic study of utopian term in west owes to the Thomas More Utopia book. Theoretically, Farabi&rsquos utopian thoughts influenced development of utopian system in both Islam and Western civilizations. By emphasis on Farabi&rsquos Utopia as an example of utopian ideas in Islamic civilization, and Thomas More&rsquos Utopia as an example of utopian though in the western civilization, this research tries to investigate the commonalties and differences of these utopias. The architectural and urban building spaces of these examples were studied in the conceptual viewpoint. Thomas More Utopia consists of fifty four similar cities. All of the cities have been constructed well according to the same plan as possible as. The nearest cities have approximately twenty four miles distance, and the furthest ones are not so far from each other so that the people can travel less than one day. Because of similarities in the cities, only one of them has been referred in the &ldquoUtopia&rdquo this city is Amaurot. Each city sends three wise old men to Amaurot every year to negotiate on their common affairs. Amaurot is the main city of the island and it is near the center of the island. &ldquoThe opinions of the Utopians&rdquo and &ldquoThe Policy of the City&rdquo are two books of Farabi. He expresses the political and philosophical systems of Utopia comprehensively. He divides communities qualitatively and in addition, there are cities in contrary to Utopia. He pays attention to the quality of communities from perfectionism and auspicious perspective. In other words, the goal of the city determines type of the city. Farabi likens utopia to a creature that has independent existence beyond the members of the city. The comparison of the architectural and urban building spaces of Farabi&rsquos utopia and Thomas More&rsquos utopia showed that both of the cities are placed in the defined space from urban structure perspective both of them have defined volume and level, and the difference is that Thomas More&rsquos utopia is located in an islands and Farabi&rsquos utopia is universal. The More&rsquos city has a defied localization but Farabi&rsquos city does not posse this characteristic. Farabi has referred to the market space and transaction regarding to the urban micro spaces while Thomas More has referred to passages, hospitals, market and hall and other specification, situations and services. More has not explained the social and geographical divisions, but Farabi divides his utopia into complete and incompetent city and offers subcategories of human communities. Thomas More has emphasized on the urban divisions on streets and fragmentation of the city and also has referred to details like type of material, material used and entrance of city while, in Farabi&rsquos utopia has no references to the details of the architectural spaces and he has emphasized on educational and social goals.