Architectural Creativity as Architecture of Creativity; Analyzing and Rating of the Physics-Based Psychological Effects of the Sense of Place on Environmental Users’ Creativity (Case Study: Higher Education Institutions of Kermanshah, Iran)

Creativity is a certain property of the man that has been especially valuable in human societies and knowledge such as environmental psychology. Accordingly, the present research tries to answer the question “How many important the effects of physical factors of architectural place are on the users’ creativity and what is the role of architectural design in organizing them to enhance it?” Therefore, the purpose of the present paper is to explain the main characteristics of creative places in a pattern form by identifying and categorizing the physical factors of the built environment. In terms of methodology, the configuration of the present research is based on Grounded Theory and a mixed method in which the findings resulted from a comprehensive documentary and field study has been completed and validated by applying statistical techniques on the data collected in a purposeful case study. The sample of this case study is three universities in Kermanshah, Iran, consists of educational environments of architecture in which teachers and post-graduate students identified and expressed their creativity-stimulant behaviors as well as the physical items of the environment that afford those activities. Finally, we concluded some of the spatial features, functional spaces, and their associated environmental affordances as the main items affecting the users’ creativity enhancement that ultimately have been classified and rated by an exploratory factor analysis as creativity-effective environmental attributes to be considered in designing the future environments in general and educational environments especially, as the main strategy. It could be pointed to the dynamism, generativity, justifiability, enrichment, and durability, on the one hand, and naturalism, interactivity, formal and functional balance and appropriateness, diversity of usage, multi-semantic in form and function, individualism, and composure, on the other hand, in the form of two distinct and correlative categories, among the most important of these attributes.