A Research on Limitations of Flexibility in Iranian Contemporary Housing

Flexibility” is generally defined as the ability to change in materials. In architecture and environmental designing, particularly in designing residential places that forms the main subject in this study, the term refers to spatial flexibility in man-made spaces and their changes to achieve new conditions, needs and activities. Although flexibility in architecture can be formed in response to climatic and structural changes, but in this study the main point referred to from the term, is the ability to react and respond to factual changes in life conditions. The origin of these changes is based on the changes of internal human needs rather than the changes in external forces such as environmental forces, energy and statics concepts. Flexibility points to the idea of conformity among different objects in the course of time. Therefore a flexible house is the one that is capable to adapt with the needs of people and attract their partnership. People’s adaptation with their needs increases with their partnership in the procedure that results in an increase in general satisfying feels from residential places. In the recent years, the shortage of housing and their low quality has been always considered as a socio-economic problem. Flexibility, if adopted with the structural changes in space and its various usages, forms one of the major concepts that lead to enhancement of the residential places. The way the designers look at this concept, results in different kinds and degrees of flexibility in designing residential places. As the definitions show, if flexibility is observed in architectural designs, many favorite enhancements would be seen in visual scenes. Although flexibility form the key concept of social and spatial elements in the traditional residential architecture, nowadays it is ignored in all the globe especially in Iran so that it is stopped in researches and canceled from designing plans either in managing or execution levels. Besides many concepts for the term “flexibility”, this paper is seeking to answer some questions like “which factors cause any enthusiastic trend to flexibility in contemporary Iranian architecture?”, “in what range these factors change?” and “how these factors tend to change to influence on the designs? Descending or ascending?” Thus, in this study we attempted to identify the causes of ignoring flexibility principals in contemporary Iranian architecture. To gain this objective, various economic, social, political and structural factors that are regarded as the obstacles of forming flexible housing, directly or indirectly, were identified and analyzed by the use of dynamic analytical systems, feedback management systems, economic systems, demographic researches, social systems and all types of the systems currently prevalent in the market. The results can be used by designers to put away the limitations, damages and the obstacles in the way to achieve flexible residential places.