architectural plan
Central plateau region in Iran has hot and dry weather with low rainfall and dramatic difference between temperature of day and night. When you see and think about the architecture of houses you will find that they are typically the same. All of them have compact and introvert architectural plan which overlooks central rectangular yard. Rectangular shape of yard provides shade at least in one side of the yard and also obtain the cool space at that side. By introvert architectural plan I mean no stranger can see inside the house from outside. Exterior tall walls of the traditional houses used to be built plain and without much decoration. Just the entrance has special decoration with a recessed entrance door. Actually Hashti (=Corridor), the space where is located after entrance made the interior space covered from outside, in a way, in spite of opening the door it was impossible to watch interior garden and yard. The Corridor (in Persian Hashti) leads the people to the yard. In some houses in this climate have exterior yard in addition to interior yard where was dedicated to guests who was men. Both yards are separate and has no view to each other.
Another feature of these houses is separating service rooms from life places. This issue keeps all kitchens, restrooms, bathroom, store and stables away from living rooms to provide comfort and quietness.
House builders’ consideration
- Generally, in this region the houses were built with adobe brick and mud which had great thermal capacity.
- Because sometimes the weather is so hot the rooms were built inside the hill or under the ground (we will talk about that more in our products later) to be protected from the heat or hot days of summer and make rooms with nice temperature.
- As we just said the architectural plan are compacted and the reason is minimizing the heat exchange between inside and outside of the room whether in summer or in winter.
- In addition to architectural plan, city tissue and neighborhood is also compacted because the want to achieve more shade on external walls the get more coolness for inside the house.
- In order to reduce the heat created on the wall from the sunshine they covered the internal walls with white substance like plaster.
- Because of shortage of wood for building the roof they try to build the house with arc like hemisphere in of course desert-like districts.