Architectural Plan
Like hot and dry climate, traditional houses in cold and mountainous climate have central yard and compact architectural plan. Of course, with this difference that rooms on northern side of the yard is bigger than rooms on the other sides. Hall and main sitting room are located on northern side of the yard to take advantage of direct sunshine and heat of the sun in winter. Because usually the summer is shorter than winter during the year, they used southern side less than northern rooms. Southern, eastern and western rooms were used as services spaces like kitchen, barn and stables. Other features are similar with architecture in central region houses.
Material
Because of plenty and accessibility, stone a general substance to build the houses is stone. Settlements sometimes and somewhere built their house inside the stone. The best and intriguing example is Kandovan village near Tabriz city on the hillsides of Sahand mountain. The height of the conic cliffs is between 10-15 meters. These bounds are located along the river and on the other side besides the hills and in aspect of climate and sunshine is on good suitable place.
Despite air temperature in different points of the climate is not the same, the architectural method of traditional houses in cold and mountainous climate to prevent wasting energy are the same. In most cases they are even the same as hot and dry houses, but the only difference is that the heat source is inside the house.
Consideration of house builders
- They have compacted architectural plan to waste less heat (the resemblance to houses of hot and dry climate).
- Utilizing materials with high thermal capacity.
- There is low number of walls or mutual surfaces between outside and inside depends on the volume of room space, to prevent extra heat exchange between the exterior and interior spaces.
- Choosing flat roofs to keep the accumulated snow as an isolator.
- Necessity of taking advantage of sunshine in cold and mountainous climate is much more than hot and dry climate.