This design is a proposal for an existing dilapidated residential complex named Kooshk, which is designed in detail in this project. The area is about 50000 square meters. This master’s thesis project consists of a comprehensive proposal of massing, zone planning, master planning, block configurations, and detailed design of a residential units.
All parking lots are located at the underground level, so that ground level is allocated just for pedestrians. Pedestrian paths are both practically and aesthetically influenced by existing significant axes in the urban neighborhood.
Zoning the whole site is approached by the impacts of context forces, namely climate, social fabric, and urban fabric. The mentioned axes divided the site into three main zones or blocks. In designing each of these blocks, the form, façade, and communal spaces are designed interactively with interior plans. The process of harmonizing interior units with the master plan is repeated in some steps until they perfectly met all requirements. Skyline, a combination of mass and voids are created based on the scenarios of living, gathering, and accessing spaces.
Although this design tries to present some patterns based on the theoretical part of the thesis with its psychological orientation of the environment, flexibility is a pivotal value. That is, in whether interior designing or other fixed components as outdoor furniture, the element of flexibility is considered. In terms of adjusting the level of privacy, inhabitants can move balconies grills, leave them open, or close them completely.
Critiques of existing social housings usually refer to their uninhabitable situations, whether socially or environmentally. In the theoretical part of the thesis, the author focuses on finding what is missing in existing social housings and making them unsatisfactory places to live in. Based on statistics, some factors made rapid social housings inefficient. That is, these anonymous shelters are isolated, deprived, and inhabitable. According to behavioral science, which offers physical and dimensional manifestations of abstract psychological concepts, architecture can provide residents with potentials that increase their satisfaction and living quality.
In this thesis, six factors derived from different sources are chosen(based on a thorough literature review of references in “Behavioral Science in the Environment” ) to apply in the designing process. These qualitative factors are “privacy,” “place attachment,” “legibility, ” “identity,” “safety, ” “beauty,” and “sensuous enrichment” and the lack thereof played a significant role in social housings’ uninhabitability based on many experiments and publications research and residents’ declaration. Another part of theoretical research was to find the best physical equivalences for these concepts. For example, the formal emergence of optimal privacy and security in landscape design is porous edges and flexible rather than rigid. Another form of buildings that was shaped in response to legibility is providing diversity, which offers a chance of visual marking for passers-by. The biophilic tendency in humans also was another parameter to measure users’ satisfaction. In this design project, nature is considered not only as vegetation and plants but also as penetration of sky, earth, and local animals. This purpose is achieved by framing views of the sky, views of the combination of the city skyline, and trees.
Different types of units:
Based on the master plan, circulation paths, horizontal and vertical accesses, in addition to patios and other obligatory criteria, a suitable location of residential could be found. These units were categorized into fourteen different types, ten of which were designed in detail. In these ten types, there are three types of one-bedroom plan, three types of three-bedroom plan, and four types of two-bedroom plan. Communal spaces
Realizing the value of designating communal spaces of different sizes, the author/designer of the project spread three scales of places for gathering: small yards for each building, medium yards for each block, and one vast, central area for big congregations in the heart of the complex. Although visual links matted in terms of a determining factor in the sense of place issue, all openings were in the tilted direction from people’s private zones. For instance, windows were shifted above pedestrians’ height on the first floor.
Mass and void interactions, incorporating social and gathering places in small, medium, and large scales among the buildings and penetrating trees in voids symmetrically are some of the most important ideas which are included in designing this social housing.
