IAARA::International Conference on Patterning From Traditional Architecture to Access Contemporary Architecture

Endeavour towards extensive sustainable development relies on optimum application of all feasibilities and potentialities that this process in the architecture of the past had been contiguous. In the cities, as the man’s greatest handmade, buildings are the
significant elements that have symbolic and identification facets other than physical and functional characteristics. Attention to construction quality and their sustainability conditions necessitate production of a special type of architecture typology leaning on indigenous conditions and energy consumption and the energy issue in a bilateral
challenge plays a role in urban sustainable development concept.
Energy crisis in the last chapters of fossil energies has created a commencement of establishing a new movement in architecture production area with the emphasis on consuming new energies and specifically consumption of solar energy.
Re-identification of the traditional architecture without prejudice towards its typological further application seems necessary due to the point that the materials could be applied appropriately in order to have access to sustainable architecture.
This conference intends to pose the subject of the patterning from traditional
architecture to access to contemporary architecture relying on the optimum use of energy.
For this purpose I am pleased to invite all managers, professionals, experts, professors and university students to participate in this scientific event.

Mohammad Taghi Hariri
Associate Professor of Architecture at Tehran University
Tradition of the Use of Restorable Energy and its Application Along With New Technology
What influences social-political and cultural equation of the 21st century will be nothing except for energy use and production. If we believe in this, programming for energy use will be an integral part of short and long term programs of each country which is interested to be developed.
For an appropriate programming, we will require to pay attention to the lessons from past generations and energy expiry date from the past to now. This view should be intelligent as well as being updated based on the techniques accessible for the present generation. The techniques that are undoubtedly play a key role in human’s life to access to comfort. A critical & analytical look with a broad insight without bias will definitely lead the thinkers of any country to solve production and energy use issues.
This presentation will briefly debate the main issues as the introductory lecture.

Mehdi N. Bahadori
Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology
Vice President of Research at the Iranian Academy of Sciences
Baud-Geer, an Iranian Masterpiece of Engineering
Wind towers or wind catchers or Baud-Geers (as they are called in Persian) have been used in the desert regions of Iran and the neighboring countries for centuries. They catch the wind at higher elevations and direct it to the occupied space, thus providing a gentle air speed in the living areas. The air can be passed over cooled or wet surfaces before entering the living space, thus providing a greater thermal comfort for the occupants. The wind towers have also been employed in conjunction with underground water cisterns in order to help keep the stored water cool during summer. Several designs of wind towers are presented and their operation under windy conditions and when there is no wind blowing is reviewed. Two new designs of wind towers, where evaporative cooling is incorporated in them, are also presented. Their performance is investigated both analytically and experimentally. One design is called the wind tower with wetted column and the other one with wetted surfaces. The wind tower with wetted column performs best in areas with high wind speeds, and the one with wetted surfaces performs best in areas when the wind speeds are not high

Bernd Lotsch
Professor at the University of Vienna
General Director of the Natural History Museum Vienna
Suggestion of a New "Eco City Iran"
Using the Wisdom of Hundreds of Generations in teh Desert
The author, having lectured in Tehran and Esfahan and studied indigenous building in several desert cities in 1977 came back to Iran after 27 years, pleased to see the well maintained Islamic monuments of Iranian culture. At the same time, he was shocked to see the townscapes looking more and more globalized (i.e. faceless and ugly, overrun by air-conditioning units that multiply the energy consumption of buildings) despite of policies which wanted to shield Iran’s admirable culture from a hasty alienation by the American way of life. He was desperate to see how the wonderful traditional “pedestrian zones” of bazaars and kuchés are now being spoiled or even terrorized by motor cycles with two stroke engines, noisy, aggressive by speed and emitting the noxious blue exhaust fumes of the lubricant under the vaults and domes of these formerly most liveable areas,. Without doubt one has to accept the urgent need of mobility and small scale delivery vans in old centres as well as in growing cities lacking sufficient public transport. Motor emissions are aggravated by photo-oxidants produced by the high UV radiation of the pitiless Iranian sun above 1000 meters altitude - certainly some of the most pressing health hazards. The evident development of the recent three decades is provocative to urban ecologists as well as to admirers of Iranian architecture and of the timeless wisdom of Islamic urban design for desert regions. So the author suggests an experimental ECO CITY to be built not far from one of Iran’s major urban congestions, connected by efficient public transport. It should prove the advantages of traditional house types and demonstrate all essential features of Islamic urban design – especially those having turned out to be highly functional (i.e. climatically and socially adapted) – also in the light of contemporary scientific knowledge.
The ECO CITY would become a testing site for appropriate, environment-friendly technologies where the accumulated intelligence of well proven tradition will merge with future options like photovoltaic, electronic control systems or bionics.
The first step towards this aim should be to collect the very best solutions of climatic design (e.g. passive cooling systems in Iranian architecture), of urban green (e.g. creating new tree lined alleys with the help of djubbs, sometimes even before house constructing has started), bazaars vaulted by domes, traditional pedestrian zones with very limited access for combustion engines but with a rich diversity of alternative modes of mobility, low energy housing and technologies (electricity saving fridges, lighting, household equipment), ecological water management and sewage treatment, garbage separation (recycling and composting measures).
Iran could take over a world wide respected lighthouse function for such an idea which is preformed but not yet formulated in so many minds in so many different regions (which would also need so many regional differentiations – thinking globally but acting locally).
Iran has the advantage that traditional wisdom is still available in arts and craftsmanship, building, water management and desert gardening – though running out and sometimes being on the brink of extinction. So ECO CITY could also help several professions to survive and maintain satisfying labour intensive types of employment with low environmental impact or even an ecologically beneficial effect.To show that his approach to ecological building is not merely theoretical but also practical (though completely devoid of contemporary fashion), the author gives an example: His impressions of traditional Iranian architecture were not limited to inspire urban ecology for desert regions but also influenced the planning of an ECO HOUSE in Europe – in building a field station and National Park Academy for the National History Museum near the Danube

Ardeshir Mahdavi
Director of teh Department of Building Physics and Building Ecology, Vienna University
An Empirical Approach to the Scientific Study of Traditional Architecture
Traditional buildings around the world entail numerous intelligent design features, emerged and successively refined through the historical process of adjustment to local climatic conditions and social circumstances. To make this embodied design knowledge accessible to contemporary architecture, a thorough understanding of the working of such environmentally adapted buildings is necessary. Toward this end, general qualitative descriptions of the respective design strategies must be complemented with detailed performance analyses based on high-resolution empirical data. The present contribution introduces a systematic framework for and the initial results of a research effort to obtain, analyze, and interpret data from traditional buildings. Specifically, an ongoing research effort is presented to collect local climate and building performance data regarding a number of traditional buildings in the North-African and Mediterranean countries.

George Katodrytis
Associate Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture & Design at the American University of Sharjah
Contemporary Architecture With Attention to Sustainability & Environment
Emerging Morpho(eco)logies
(Performative Systems / Adaptive and Mimetic Space / Digital and Evolutionary Process)
The architecture of morpho(eco)logies and its design process is based on the idea that energy and environment is a dynamic and performative system of operations, forms, materials and programs which through self organizational and modulating processes can provide optimized solutions to complex and diverse problems. The design of such evolutionary and dynamic space can be generated by digital algorithmic methods. These methodologies can tackle the problem of sustainability.
Energy and most natural phenomena is an adaptive and self-sufficient process that achieves and maintains survival and optimization without external control. The research and design of such morpho(eco)logical systems engage the examination of physical systems in relation to their capacity to modulate climates, as well as space and program.
Architecture, in order to be sustainable can now imitate processes in nature. It becomes dynamic and adaptive and therefore it gains organic features. The boundaries between organic and inorganic are blurred. The body itself is invaded and reshaped by technology.
Environmental mimesis is a means for survival and performance. Animals are seen as perfecting mimicry (adaptation to their surroundings with the intent to deceive their pursuer) as a means of survival. By means of the mimetic impulse, the living being equates itself with objects in its surroundings. This holds the key to exploring the question of how human situate themselves within their environment.
Evolutionary systems require new conceptual and as well as technological inventiveness. Used as design tools, the new techniques of digital technology allow the modeling of forms as dynamic fields with forces and vectors. These interactive fields create the formation and subsequent deformation of the modeled space. These can be flows of people and vehicles, as well as the direction of sun and wind, new programmatic “attractors” and “repulsors”, etc. Such systems may exist as an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture that are understood as a whole.
One technique by which mimesis is constructed is by algorithms that are programmed to execute a series of mimetic tasks. Genetic algorithms constitute a class of search algorithms especially suited to solving complex optimization problems. Through its use the algorithm architectural notation has become operational: to design the choreographing of the transformation process. The architectural object is transformed into event and performance.
The architect now becomes a constructor of formal systems than static spaces. This new condition gives architecture an “autopoiesis”, similar to biological dynamics. As such, architecture may become - paradoxically - rigorous yet more uncanny and introverted.
By using scripting languages it is possible to create forms through methods analogous to the evolution of intelligent life: emergent behavior and self-organizing systems. It pursues various methods through which the role of the designer can shift from "space programming" to "programming space". As an example the Architecture of Morpho(eco)ecologies is an 'autonomous' settlement project that is flexible, adaptive and inventivze in its response to environmental conditions. It forms the beginnings of a “necklace” of settlements arranged in a linear coastal pattern - along the Persian Gulf - that could suggest merging growth dynamics that in the future could form a continuous mega city.

Reza Pourvaziry
President of the International Art & Architecture Research Association (IAARA)
Member of the Steering Committee for the Best Practices and Local Leadership programme (BLP) of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT)
Vice President of the Iranian National Commission (MOST) for UNESCO.
Urban Sustainability, an Approach to Traditional Architecture Patterns
The cities in the past made specific micro-climates based on vernacular knowledge within a context. The organism of this wet and porous context constituted “houses” the living active units like body skin. Materials, plants, appropriate light and shade effect, a network for air circulation in its deep physic and its active connection to the energy resource made all the elements of this context to be remained active. This micro-climate has lost its active life in contemporary architecture by prioritizing transport and technology regardless of living urban architecture. Attention and emphasis on traditional living patterns will not be possible without confronting with contemporary issues of the city or will not be effectively enough at least. This pattern will have its own specific urban planning and it will be sustainable city pattern.
Patterning from the city and past architecture for contemporary use encompasses the recognition of the lessons and their sustainability elements.
This presentation will introduce those lessons and elements in the light of field studies and analytical researches in Kashan.

Behrouz Mohammad Kari
Head of Building Materials & Products Department of Building & Research Center
An Approach to National Codes in Traditional Architecture & Existing Buildings
A considerable part of the cultural heritage of a country is concealed in traditional architecture. It is evident that by gradual remove of the old buildings, the identity and our ancestor’s achievements will be destroyed as well.
Considering the specific problems in this field existing in our country, it is essential to do the required examinations and feasibility studies in order to define the expedients in case of the change of the functions of the old buildings.
In this survey different rules and expectations considered in the existing buildings will be evaluated and the required strategies for the appropriate performance of the regulations and some proposals to be included in future editions of the national regulations will be presented.

Nasser Golzari
Architecture Pathway Leader and Technology Lecturer at Central Saint Martin University
Sun is Still Shining
The Role of Local Building Culture in Sutainability of Architectural Technology & Cultural Identity
A great many communities in advanced western countries or in developing cities are
torn between the conflicting issues of global demands, with the fast-moving capitalist
free-market economy and its effect on effect on the built environment, set against
their constant quest for cultural identity and the creation of sustainable communities
and an affordable environment.
The role of architecture and architects in regard to the globalising process has been
debated time and time again, and will no doubt continue to be debated. Our current
awareness of the issue of sustainability, and of the push to find new technologies to
promote the notion of sustainability, is growing by the day – whether in terms of using
natural resources as alternative means of producing energy, or of finding methods to
build more responsibly. Eco-buildings, green towers, green developments, green
villages … these and similar concepts are currently being proposed for Manchester,
Birmingham (Bed-Zed), London, Madrid (Eco-Boulevard), China, etc. Then there are
developments like the Eco-Business Park in Okehampton or the Solarsiedlung
(Solar Village) in Freiburg, Germany. There are also numerous other examples.
Perhaps the most crucial question about these new-found sustainable projects is
whether they actually address the key issue of cultural identity. What is their
relevance to their location? Does the way that the proposed technologies are
developed take into consideration, for instance, the day-to-day activities and
practices of the builders on site? When bits of the building go wrong, as they
undoubtedly will in time, are the technologies proposed really addressable by the
typical local builder. Do the parts that make the building so energy efficient have in
fact to come from a global market, maybe from hundreds if not thousands of miles
away? How familiar are the users with the buildings they are expected to use? Does
the architecture share any belonging with its physical and cultural context? And,
perhaps most important of all, what does it all matter?
The architecture profession has by now developed extensive information on the
technical performance of building elements and how we need to detail buildings to
perform certain technical functions to protect us against the weather and natural
forces. In general, however, this knowledge is mostly about abstract design issues
and how to detail building components that can operate most effectively within a
certain place or environment. Very few books have set the criterion of the need for
architecture to be based on more specific cultural and climatic factor.
This leads to some intriguing questions. How many of our commonplace technical
practices in contemporary architecture are in fact based on local associations or local
habits? How do we in fact choose to place or site a given design proposal?

Peter Barber
Lecturer and Design Tutor at Westminster University
High-Density Low-Rise Urabn Housing Projects
‘…the passion for improvisation, which demands that space and opportunity be at any price preserved. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres, Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stages and boxes.
Walter Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, 1924.
This talk will focus primarily on three of our high-density low-rise urban housing projects. They were all commissioned as housing projects, but each in its way has developed a strongly urban agenda.
The first project is the Hagerstown West and kings land Master plan, which is a design for a new dense city quarter in East London. The second, our competition winning entry for the Circle 33 ‘Innovation in Housing’ Competition and the third is our Tanner Street Gateway project.
Before describing the projects, I will set out two short preambles, which aim to propose an ideological and political context and capture the ethos and atmosphere of the projects.
I will then show images of the schemes themselves showing that they are all street based and are configured to promote vibrant and busy public space, securely bounded by a hard edge of buildings. Streets are overlooked by balconies, bay windows and roof terraces and there are places where people might enjoy sitting out and kids can play; people go to and from heir dwellings or are just passing through.
I will talk a bit about the dwellings themselves showing how we have developed innovative new courtyard typologies (unusual in the UK but which owe more than a little to Southern European and Middle Eastern Vernaculars) and I will talk about how they enable us to achieve quite high urban densities without building high-rise apartment blocks.
I will conclude by saying the projects described are all based on the idea of the ‘street’ as central to successful urban design; designed to bring people into close proximity, where residents are highly visible to one another and where there is a strong likelihood that they will meet. They are projects designed to promote a high level of interdependence between individuals, and in the long term it is hoped that they might help to empower groups of people who are strongly self determined.
All projects are driven by an optimistic, but we think realistic, view of society and of an architecture that can help to shape cities that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable

Magda Sibley
School of Architecture, The University of Liverpool
Co-Editor of an international electronic journal "The Global Built Environment Review"
Hammams: Lessons of Sustainability and Future Developments
The public bath, or hammām, has been an integral part of the urban fabric in Islamic cities. Whereas other building types have attracted much attention in the past, studies of historic hammāms have remained scarce. Furthermore, Islamic public baths have rarely been part of conservation and rehabilitation projects. As a result, evidence of this important architectural heritage building is disappearing rapidly.
Based on surveys carried by the author on the hammāms in North Africa and the Middle East, this lecture will highlight the characteristics of this vernacular building as well as its urban, social and environmental functions. It will stress its importance as a sustainable urban facility which not only promotes cleanliness and health of the urban dwellers but also provides social interaction and support for a rich intangible heritage. The lecture will highlight lessons of sustainability in relation to thermal comfort, under-floor heating systems, water heating and recycling of by-products from local small industries. The lecture will then discuss possible future adaptive re-use of this building type in the light of a sustainable architecture agenda and the development of new technologies

Seyed Mohammad Hossein Ayatollahi
Dean of Architecture Faculty of Yazd University (1989-1994)
Director of Architecture Department of Yazd University (1999-2006)
Lessons From Yazd Traditional Architecture to Design New Houses
Iranian traditional architecture and city planning had used sustainability in many different aspects of it, especially the use of renewable energy and low energy consumption buildings.
During recent trends of architecture and city planning developments (after Qajar period), very few buildings have been built following the traditional concepts with the use of new technology. After reviewing the traditional concepts and examples of sustainability in Iranian architecture and city planning and introducing the passive solar house that have been designed and built by present author in Yazd (city of Badgirs), using some of the traditional concepts of passive cooling and heating, this paper will focus on the results of the two years evaluation on measuring the heating and cooling savings to prove proposed hypothesis of the research.The paper will also explain changes and influences of design on living patterns of the family during five years of living in the house due to continuous relationship and outdoor conditions using sun or wind for heating or cooling. Finally the paper will conclude suggestions for improvements and additional retrofits