Evaluation of Chaharbagh Street Facades and its Driving Patterns Using of Fractal Geometry

Developments in science and technology have had many effects on human lives causing the formation of new views and procedures in various disciplines such as architecture and urbanism. One of these views is the Complexity Theory and the geometry of organic structures such as fractal geometry that have influenced the urban issues. Euclidean geometry is dominated by the concept of things as having one, two or three dimensions. This is suitable for describing objects or shapes that are completely regular, but Mandelbrot (1977) argues that much of the ‘natural’ world, and it is also argued here that much of an urban development, cannot be adequately described using the concepts of Euclidean geometry. It should be noted that this discussion applies to the 3D material world. Mandelbrot (1977) used the term ‘fractal’ to describe shapes or objects that demonstrate repeating patterns when examined at increasingly smaller scales, which demonstrate scale invariance (Mandelbrot, 1977). This special quality of scale invariance shows up in many natural patterns that can be identified and quantified by a parameter called “fractal dimension”. Nowadays, fractal analysis and the calculation of fractal dimensions offer a practical method in urban studies at different scales. Implementing the fractal geometry in realizing and analyzing urban structures in different scales has been the course of action for a number of researchers so far. In fact, most of these studies have used the fractal dimension as a quantitative criterion for the assessment and evaluation of city structures in different viewpoints ranging from the manner of developments in cities and the factors affecting it to the relationship between environmental qualities and the fractal dimension in urban spaces. In other words, different individuals have studied this relationship while trying to quantify the qualities existing in the space. But most of the researches have focused on analyzing the fractal structure of the city and have done limited work in new developments using the results of these researches. Apart from other researchers’ attempts to introduce fractals in architecture, another crucial attempt to introduce fractals to architecture was made by Carl Bovil in his book, Fractal Geometry in Architecture and Design (Hagerhall, 2004). His approach is more practical and more concerned to suggest a method to layout the project according to fractals. With an extensive introduction on fractal geometry, he delves a great deal into the mathematical aspect of fractals trying to base his method on the idea of fractal dimension. He uses fractal dimensions to produce a fractal rhythm of different sized elements. The important point in this method that sets it apart from others is that it elicits patterns from the existing context to analyze and offers guidelines in new developments along a dynamic process that adjusts different personal ideas. Nowadays, organic cities with their complex systems have gone through a lot of changes. As a result of these changes, a valuable structure of such cities is suffering from decay and destruction. Also, realizing the hidden order in such structures and developing this system to new or replacement structures and developments have turned out to be the main concern of architects and urban designers. One of the problems that many cities in Iran are facing with is the new construction in the more developed zone around historical sites. The challenge one faces when being inspired by the valuable historical structures for the purpose of modeling for the development of new constructions is the fact that copying the existing embedded structures often turns out to be discouraging and self-imposed. The main question focused on in this research is how one can create a new historical-oriented structure while maintaining the environmental qualities of valuable historical structures without repeating the existing patterns bearing in mind the modern taste, materials, and technologies. In this paper, fractal geometry is used as a means to determine the degree of complexity and its desirability. This research provides a fractal analysis of valuable facades linking the calculation of fractal dimension to context indicators from existing patterns. ChaharBagh-Abbasi Street as structural axis of Isfahan has many historical buildings and nowadays is known as main retail street in the city. Therefore, improving the quality of space and reforming the facades are in priority. This street is selected as a case study and the fractal dimension of its valuable façades were calculated using the method of box-counting with professional software Benoit 1.3. After that the obtained numbers of fractal dimension were converted to a grid-like and we suggest guideline for new developments or projects of reconstruction in this historical street.