Designing Family-Friendly Architectural Environments Mohammad Mashayekhi

Family is the most significant and fundamental social unit. Despite the fact that the most important commitment of architecture in every country is creating spaces with high quality of life, creating high quality spaces for familie's use is a part of this spectrum which has primary importance. Family and the institution of house, as its framework, are the most important parts of architecture both quality- and quantity-wise. If these environments do not provide an appropriate space for common family behaviors, we cannot expect healthy family environments. In order to achieve this goal, family and its behavioral territory should be first known and then we can focus on residential complexes. The present article examines the two concepts of designing and sociology of architecture with the aim of focusing on family-friendly environments, their quality, and the extent to which they are used in spaces of residential complexes. To gain this objective, the meaning of family and its environment in social context was probed and then residential complexes were studied as environments which are used as the most significant space by different classes of people and most important of all by families. In this study, an indirect assessment was carried out and through using semiotics of communication theory and analysis of Simmel theory the obtained results were analyzed. More specifically, the behavior of users in residential complexes and the way through which the users used public spaces in these complexes were examined. In addition, a comparison was made between the behavior of different groups of space users. As a result, appropriate spaces for users especially the proper ones for families were identified and the effective factors in individual's use of these spaces were indentified and categorized.