The Role of Dipole Space Structures in the Upgrade of Civic Communicability and the Sense of Place, Case Study: Ritual and Civic Collections

In recent years, much attention has been paid by different civil and architectural engineers and experts to the problems caused by the existence of a downward trend in civic communicability and reduction in the social sense of place. In the last few decades, the humanistic dimensions and social quality of space have also been taken into account by the designers and programmers. In this context, the present thesis has sought to examine the interactive roles of public spaces in social communicability and upgrading the sense of place. First, the downward trend of sense of place and incommunicability in modern public space has been considered and the importance of the issue has been evaluated based on different psychological and linguistic theories of environment. Therefore, in order to demonstrate the importance of the communicability principle, the present study has made use of the linguistic issues due to their emphasis on the skeletal elements in the design of an environment. On the other hand, using the psychological models, the behavioralsensual elements have been underscored so that the principle of communicability can be explained in the discussed design of the environment. Within a framework of the research hypothesis and based on the communication concept, different interactions regarding to such principles and the relationship among the interactive spaces have been realized as the interaction of spaces play a key role in the communicability. Therefore, the level of communicability can be demonstrated and evaluated based on the criteria such as function (type of application), proximity (hierarchy), and direction (communicable, incommunicable). The research is focused on the public spaces for meeting and gathering outside of the residential and business sites. These spaces are assumed to be accessible for the general community. Moreover, the spaces are supposed to encourage the people to have public interactions, while they are designed to open up some opportunities for general gathering and communication. Moreover, under this scenario, accessibility is further emphasized and privileged over the ownership or management of the social spaces. In our proposed protocol, traditional civil spaces with dipole (i.e., reciprocal) attraction have been investigated. The importance of paying attention to these sets of construction can be explained by the fact that the discussed concept has a substantially fundamental place in the spatial understanding of the Islamic architecture of Iran. However, in the contemporary civil and architectural engineering, the extracted problem has mostly been ignored. While previous dipole structures are on the verge of destruction, no new structures have alternatively been formed. Consequently, due to their unipolar characteristics, the sites, which had been constructed with the original aim of social livelihood, have gradually changed into the uncivil and relatively secluded areas, which cannot attract the audiences and are shifted into the passing channels for the passengers. In the efficiency test of the research model, using the case-survey approach and analytical-descriptive method, twelve dipole religious-ritualistic civic and combinational (civic-ritualistic) sets have been analyzed. In religious and ritualistic sets, the spatial attraction is due to the pilgrimage facet, and hence the environmental perception is affected by emotional and religious factors. On the other hand, in the civic sets, due to the spatial diversity and plurality, different motivations can participate in further attraction of the audiences. In the combinational sets, the motivations behind the spatial presence change in proportion to the variations in the spatial applicability. Our obtained results are in conformity with the results of the studies arguing for the upgrading of social interactions in the general public spaces. Comparative investigation of the findings shows that interaction of polar spaces is highly effective in the absorption and encouragement of social and voluntary activities and despite the gradual changes in the function of the poles, directions, and adjacencies of the spaces, physical- performance renovation in segments or the whole is possible. Parameters such as the basis and background of two main poles, adjacency pattern, function adjustability, and the presence of minor activity-adsorbent poles can help in the enhancement of function and structural interactions in dipole spaces. Attention to the communicative art and visual aspects through the formation of consecutive function-space sights can increase the sense of place in civic areas through encouraging emotional reactions. Creation of interactive dipole structures and enhancement of sense of place through site-finding in local and civil scales is possible. Due to the inclusion of characteristics such as the complexity, secrecy, seclusion, and sense of belonging to the place, the experience of the presence in the dipole space has proved to be a memorable experience, and thus the repetition of this spatial presence is guaranteed.