Assessment of the Role of Archetypes in Creation of Sense of Place in Iranian Mosques Using AHP

Taking into account the decrease in public presence in religious places, it appears that one of the main reasons for the lost connection between audiences and sacred sites is the lack of sense of place. Creating a sense of place is the job of architects who utilize several factors to this end. The objective of the present study is to show that in designing, an architect considers a set of the personal unconscious mind and collective unconscious mind to achieve the optimum design based on the needs and a sense of place. Hypotheses were formed based on this. The most complete among them was that the most solid and adequate understanding of place is composed in a space that encompasses a combination of the two groups of semantic and physical archetypes. A variety of phenomenological, environment psychology, and analytical approaches helped the study to realize its objective. A combination of field and library studies provided qualitative and quantitative data to the researcher that were analyzed using the Delphi technique. The data obtained by a questionnaire were analyzed using analytical hierarchy process 1 (AHP). The findings showed that inducing a sense of place in the Iranian mosque depended on semantic archetypes, and creating, strengthening, and ensuring the survival of these archetypes turned on more robust use of physical archetypes.