Traditional Environmental Treatments in Arab Architecture: As a Guide to Contemporary Architecture

Abstract

The Arab Region embraces a diverse and substantial architectural heritage, with distinctive vocabularies and treatments, that has been as a source of inspiration for architects. However, the contemporary Arab architectural production is not at the desired level. So, the study questions the reasons for the success of Traditional Architecture in providing environmental Comfort and achieving human requirements. Besides, the study explores literature reviews of contemporary trends of studies that are concerned with employing the foundations and principles of Traditional Architecture. Therefore, this study firstly, presents a theoretical background of environmental comfort then extracts the foundations and standards of Traditional Architecture in the Arab Region, with the aim of deducing a Conceptual Framework of Traditional Architecture as a guide to Contemporary Architecture and finally a literature review of recent trends in environmental architectural studies based on traditional strategies. The results of this part show that the studies are divided into three approaches: 1) Philosophical studies that attempt to analyze Traditional Architecture to reach success criteria for traditional architecture. 2) Innovative strategies dealing with modern proposals to achieve environmental comfort based on the principles of sustainable traditional architecture. 3) Studies that focus on analyzing and developing one of the elements that distinguish Traditional Architecture. As a final point, the study presents a Systematic Framework to employ all the standards of traditional architecture and exploiting all the results of contemporary studies to serve as a guide for Contemporary Architecture.

Keywords

• environmental comfort
• thermal comfort
• traditional architecture
• contemporary architecture
• arab region