صفه (Mar 2018)
Sanandaj Historic Houses; the Reading of Physicality from a Life Culture Point of View
Abstract
To achieve an accurate understanding of a certain architecture, one needs to equally focus on explicit and implicit aspects of it, and this, in turn, requires the study of both a building’s physicality and the life lived in it. This applies to the concept of home which, as people’s main living space has more than physicality to it: it accommodates various layers of meaning, and results in an experiential-abstract blend of time and place. The accurate understanding of the home, therefore, is more than a physical understanding. Such concepts have been explored by a variety of researchers in different cultures. The present paper attempts to focus on historic houses of Sanandaj, offering a reading that goes beyond the physical and into local living culture.The research adopts a qualitative approach on three levels: on one hand there is an analysis of the town’s general characteristics and its effects on houses, as well as an analytic-descriptive comparison between some examples, and on the other hand there is an analysis based on compatibilities of local living culture and architecture of local homes through and analysis of deep, semi-structured interviews.The results show that the main distinct features of Sanandaj homes are their relation with nature, the attention paid to exterior views whilst keeping privacy, their spatial hierarchies globally and in details, and the influence of authorities’ residences on them.
