مطالب

Culture has always been regarded as the most important element of human communities; we can easily observe cultural changes. What causes these changes has been a matter of controversy. The issues such as people’s increasingly getting detached from each other, psychopathy, behavioral abnormalities, traditions being increasingly faded away, malformation, extravagancy and value conversion into anti-values led the authors to conduct an investigation into the factors which cause such changes to happen. Moreover, the paper proposes strategies for improving the situation. First, the concept of culture and its elements are discussed. Then, the impact of urban physical aspects on the culture is dealt with. In developing a theoretical framework for the study, content analysis was performed. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed for small-scale (micro-level) and large-scale (macro-level) case studies, respectively. Finally, the results were discussed and a model was proposed for the impact of the urban physical aspects on culture and behavior.

In this paper, a house is assumedas an expression of culture. It has been tried to study a Qajar1 house in Tabriz, in terms of its ties with cultural context.Methods and viewpoints of Amos Rapoport have been used in order to identify and peruse the circumstance of this relationship. The main reason for using Rapoport's viewpoints to understand Salmasi House, as a case study, in addition to contribute to cognition of this house and its relations, is presenting a method to understand many Iranian architecture samples. To explain the ties between built environment and culture, Rapoport has proposed several definitions and approaches according to environment-behavior studies. To study the house, Rapoport's has used a three-step approach, including, dismantling, analyzing, and synthesizing. At first, according to these approaches, two concepts of culture and built environment have been dismantled to variables and components. Then relationship among the variables and relationship among the components have been analyzed. At the final step, the variables have been reassembled and synthesized. Their interrelationships and their ties have been established, in order to understand the essential linkage between house form and its cultural context. The required data has been collected from three sources, direct interview with former inhabitants of Salmasi house to acquainting life and quality of behavior in house. Preliminary studies to acquainting the context of case studies, study the form of the house. The results indicate the adjustment of the form of Salmasi House with wishes, needs and totally cultural characteristics of its inhabitants.

This paper investigates the function of windcatchers in dry regions in Middle East and compares them in different fields in two areas including Yazd-Iran, and Egypt. The study exامینes windcatchers in these areas in terms of cooling system and forms, with different plans, forms, constituent components and decorations.Reassessment of windcatchers in these areas can shed light on these differences. Survey was carried out by systematic comparison sampling. Comparison of windcatcher components and performance in two areas of the Middle East can result in a comprehensive understanding of the differences in these two areas. However, to keep factors affecting windcatcher components constant, two windcatchers in two similar regions are investigated.Case comparison between windcatchers in Iran and Egypt in terms of the constituent components can be informative about the windcatcher architecture in two regions with similar climates and different cultures and can give us general knowledge of the issue. Findings of the research have shown that windcatchers have formed a cooling system in the Middle East traditional buildings and their primary function is conditioning using the wind renewable energy. The cooling system works in two ways: through displacement and displacement and evaporation. The latter has been particularly used for hot and dry climate. In hot and arid regions of the Middle East, the windcatcher shapes were determined according to the prevailing wind direction.

Although in most of the rural development plans, relocation of informal settlements is often considered as an efficient solution to increase safety of rural communities against natural and man-made disasters, such as, earthquakes, fire hazards, floods, etc. an evaluation of recent experiences in the relocation projects show that the relocated community is often unsatisfied with the new residential areas. In most cases, the new residential areas are advantageous in compare to the informal settlements in terms of utility infrastructures and architecture design but the public remain reluctant to migrate to the new place. This paper, tries to evaluate the role of Community participation in the process of informal settlements relocation projects in Kerman province, an Iranian south-eastern state, by measuring people's evaluation of their own participation in the process of decision-making during five key relocation phases, namely, choice of new location, methods of relocation, architectural design of the new areas, construction procedures and supervision on the whole project. Questionnaire survey was employed to gather these data and was followed by statistical analysis (by SPSS software) in order to approve meaningful relationships. The results showed that lack of community participation had been responsible for a number of uninhabited settlement projects and some unfinished construction projects during the whole relocation process.

For over the past several decades, there has been a great concern about energy crisis and lack of non-renewable resources. Residential buildings take more than 25% of the total energy consumption and more than 75% of energy consumption in these buildings is for heating, cooling and hot sanitary water. On the other hand, traditional buildings of Iran were designed according to ecological conditions upon which, winter or summer sections were built. In this article, first, winter section of Yazd traditional homes, which are in hot-arid region and its thermal behavior, will be studied. This computer simulation is done and vaلیداted with energy-plus software, and temperature changes of these sections were measured with lascar electronics data logger. The results confirmed its reliability. Second, sections with different proportions such as three-door room, five-door room and seven-door room in different orientations, and their thermal behavior are analyzed and compared. So the thermal behavior of winter sections in Yazd traditional homes during a year shows that in winter, the proportions of five-door room in northwest orientation is better than others.