Comparative Study of the Strategic System of Flexible Housing Design in the West and Iran

The principle of flexibility, as an environmental capability of meeting various uses compatible with people’s various goals, is one of the significant approaches to housing architecture. In Western architecture, this issue has been widely raised with an organized structure after World War I, while in Iranian architecture, it is inherently evident in traditional housing. Unfortunately, due to lack of sufficient knowledge of this principle and the reasons for its use in traditional housing, flexibility has become known as a modern western innovation by people, with the phenomenon of globalization, its western appearance has entered the contemporary architecture of Iran, and even changed the lifestyle of the Iranian people. The present study is descriptive-analytic research in which the factors forming a flexible housing, flexibility typology, and constructive elements of the western and Iranian flexible residential architectures are studied comparatively. The results show that flexibility in Iranian traditional house has originality based on needs, abilities, and knowledge raised at that time and is fully in line with the standards set at modern times and claimed by western architecture. The most important difference between the two is the issue of privacy, which has been ignored in the use of Western design structures in the Iranian context, leading to the change of Iranian lifestyle. By understanding this issue, this social dimension of housing (i.e. privacy) can be considered in the flexibility issue to see the richness of this concept in Iranian architecture