Explanation of hospitality continuity from Iranian home to contemporary apartment

Hospitality is an inseparable concept of Iranian-Islamic life. In the past, the physical-spatial context of Iranian homes provided a decent opportunity to meet this social need. The result of gradual change of Iranian homes has been the initial problem of adapting the spatial structure of contemporary housing to hospitality in Iranian culture. In this article hospitality is assumed as a positive value in the Iranian culture. The purpose of this research is to explain how to provide the physical context for supporting hospitality in contemporary apartment units, without a formal copying of the physical form of traditional Iranian homes. The main question is, which of the functional-behavioral, physical-environmental and cognitive-semantic features of the Iranian traditional homes have provided the context of Iranian house hospitality? How can these features affect hospitality in today's modern apartment units? Hospitality has been analyzed with three features, including cognitive-semantic, functional-behavioral, and physical-environmental, in three layers of “welcome-convoy”, “settlement” and “entertaining-services”. A comparative analysis of hospitality in Iranian homes has been done by selecting samples from Tehran in a chronological order. Based on this analysis, the defined spatial layers for welcoming the guest, and related spatial domains help the continuity of hospitality in the Iranian traditional houses. The hierarchy of the Iranian home spaces play an essential role in distinguishing and combining home spaces for hospitality. These two factors can be related in two mutual concepts of privacy (the distinction between territories) and flexibility (the combination of territories). Achieving to proper physical-spatial quality of apartment units for hospitality, is a good response to the initial assumption of research, on the values of family relationships and stay in touch with others in the intimate space of the home.