A Study into Interior-Exterior Relationship and Its Evolution Process in Iran's Mosques (from the Beginning to the Safavid Era)

Preserving the inside of a building is an obvious characteristic of Iranian architecture. On the other hand, experts have introduced the continuity between adjacent spaces as another distinctive characteristic of this architecture. However, few studies have investigated how to respond to the two characteristics in the inside-outside relationship of buildings where they are against each other. In order to perform such an assessment, samples of Iranian architecture should be studied. As an important use in the society of Iranian Muslims, a mosque can be a proper sample for this assessment. Therefore, the current study has evaluated the inside-outside relationship in the architecture of Iranian mosques from the beginning to the Safavid era.The goal is to discover the evolutionary procedure of mosques in Iran to create a balanced relationship between the inside and outside. In other words, employing the solutions completed in a historical process, Iranian architects have sought to link a mosque's building to its spatial and outside background and provide spatial continuity between the inside and outside by preserving the mosque's privacy.The research strategy is a combination of logical reasoning and a case study. At first, by reviewing the existing theories, the criteria determining the relationship between the inside and outside of buildings were classified. Since the classification was performed with a critical and supplementary approach, the study is classified as secondary research in the logical reasoning method. The obtained theoretical basis paves the way to evaluate the hypothesis, i.e., assess the inside-outside relationship of mosques in Iran. In order to examine the hypothesis, samples of Jameh Mosques, as buildings allocating the highest power of societies to their construction, and thus, representing the Iranian architecture more than any other sample, were chosen based on priorities. The samples were analyzed according to the library documents, including photos and maps of buildings, as well as their variations in the historical eras.It was found that in initial mosques, the inside-outside relationship was in the form of maximum separation of the two fields, while in the next eras, solutions were employed in designing mosques that directed the inside-outside relationship toward a stronger link between the two fields. Through strengthening the visual relationship, motion relationship, and shape-structural relationship, these solutions made more continuity of the mosques to their outsides so that in the Shah Esfahan mosque, in designing which the whole solutions were used, the building has such a link with its background that makes it hard to distinguish them.