The Impact of Religious Culture on Organization of Houses

Culture is the principal element in forming houses and it also plays an important role in social sustainability. In this way, it will become so important to survey in vernacular culture in order to recognize behavioral patterns of divers religions and nations. Nevertheless, the impressive factors of culture in a human made environment such as the one in city of Kerman, which has diversity in cultures and residential districts belong to Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Jewish people, have been ignored partly. So, planners have been faced with problems in codifying and organizing guidelines for designing and renovation approaches in these districts. In this paper, the matter of privacy and hospitality in Islamic culture and impacts of that on the formation of houses will be discussed through the sacred text of Quran by using the combining research method, logical reasoning and ethnography. Furthermore, it refers to the Torah and Avesta and demonstrates that the first impressive layer on the architecture of Kerman houses initiates from Islamic culture, as a predominant one there, in some principals such as privacy, neighborhood rights, and hospitality. Moreover, it shows that the second impressive layer initiates from Zoroastrian and Jewish religious beliefs and traditions formed the architecture of their houses. Therefore, their trends for security, life, needs and regarding religious rites should be considered in the future guidelines in renovation of these residential districts. Meanwhile, further studies could search for approaches & methods of converting the theoretical results of this paper into the guidelines & design principles.