Recognition of the common internal arrangement of Tehran's residential buildings

This paper addresses the typology of the internal arrangement of the common residential building in Tehran. It consists of two-principle study. The first is building a knowledge basis for the typology studies of row type apartments which conclude in introducing a framework of determinants defining different factors in which shaping the internal arrangement of apartments, and the second is the empirical survey of those factors in the sample of 128 row-type apartment layout. Addressing the common type, many developments had happened in the housing culture of Iran, which changed the common type through time. In recent decades, there have been many challenges in the planning and designing of apartment buildings. One of these challenges was matching cultural principles with new forces of the city, like densification. Furthermore, the increasing demand in the market caused because of the capital’s population growth, followed by modernization, changed the common apartment layouts. This expansion provides a massive housing construction in Tehran, which then happened to spread the new patterns of housing design, called residential units in row type apartments as the common type. In this regard, developments began with the replacement of the central courtyard brick houses into row type houses and continued to turn into row type apartments. Investigations showed that not only the urban fabric but also the internal arrangement of houses and then the apartment layout has changed through these developments. As a result, the internal arrangement of today’s residential units is different from the pattern used to be called Iranian housing pattern. This study is trying to investigate the internal arrangement of residential buildings today for the probable typologies made through new arrangements. The objective of this paper is to shed light on the pattern of residential buildings’ layout today for the probable typologies made through the new arrangements. The main question is what is the main type of the internal arrangements of residential units in today’s apartment buildings in Tehran? Where methodology is concerned, the framework of logical argumentation method seems to be appropriate for developing the framework. Secondly, the empirical part of this study has been analyzed in a sample of 128 apartments built in recent years, in district 2 of Tehran, known to be able to represent the whole city according to the multi-stage sampling method. In addition, a theoretical approach that particularly addresses configurational aspects of space, named Space Syntax has been selected as the basis for carrying out the analysis and the software AGRAPH, to graphitize the comparison of the plans. Some very similar configurational patterns have been found in this survey. The apartment’s “second form” emerge through the justified graphs as the result of using the software AGRAPH, illustrate the existence of five types of internal arrangement, two of which are the most frequent ones called type A and D and can be introduced as the internal arrangement’s pattern of today’s apartments. This study is a part of a residential building code research that can be extended to farther practical results.