arezoo mohtasham

The principle of flexibility, as an environmental capability of meeting various uses compatible with people’s various goals, is one of the significant approaches to housing architecture. In Western architecture, this issue has been widely raised with an organized structure after World War I, while in Iranian architecture, it is inherently evident in traditional housing. Unfortunately, due to lack of sufficient knowledge of this principle and the reasons for its use in traditional housing, flexibility has become known as a modern western innovation by people, with the phenomenon of globalization, its western appearance has entered the contemporary architecture of Iran, and even changed the lifestyle of the Iranian people. The present study is descriptive-analytic research in which the factors forming a flexible housing, flexibility typology, and constructive elements of the western and Iranian flexible residential architectures are studied comparatively. The results show that flexibility in Iranian traditional house has originality based on needs, abilities, and knowledge raised at that time and is fully in line with the standards set at modern times and claimed by western architecture. The most important difference between the two is the issue of privacy, which has been ignored in the use of Western design structures in the Iranian context, leading to the change of Iranian lifestyle. By understanding this issue, this social dimension of housing (i.e. privacy) can be considered in the flexibility issue to see the richness of this concept in Iranian architecture

Flexible housing presents strategies in designing in order to meet the constantly changing demands of human beings. In Islam, these needs within the framework of Islamic values resulted from heavenly names and Islamic morals form positive and negative attributes in order to define the theoretical mechanism of this approach. By overlapping Islamic values in general with the approach of flexibility, the present study tries to show that how Islamic values can be reflected in the principles of housing flexibility and determine a correct connection with the principles of Islamic architecture. In this direction, with a descriptive and meta-analytical method using library and field-study ,the Islamic values effective in housing(territory, dignification, emphasis on gathering , beauty and remembrance)that are among the most remembrances in Islam from mythical and ethical resources were prioritized with AHP systematic analysis, with the help of Expert choice software and the questionnaire of Islamic science experts. In fact the quantitative values of the criteria and sub-criteria ,determine the sensitivity of presence of each value accompanied with its sub-criteria as well as in general. At the end it was revealed that territory holds the highest criteria and sub-criteria significance and determining the hierarchy and apposition of spaces with the goal of limiting future changes has to be placed in the first place of the principles of flexible housing.