Re-reading the Regionalism Approaches in the Contemporary Buildings of Mashhad

Regionalism is a critical view to architecture that tries to stand up as preservation of the characteristics of a place and can be seen as theory of reference to establishing harmony between people, built environment, and nature. Using textual forces, this approach saught to confront the placenessless of modernism to obtain meaning and a sense of place, and at the same time saught to fill this void, which is deeply rooted in the gap between thought and feeling over the last century. The current study attempted to present the importance of this issue, its different aspects and an approach called regionalism in architecture to show why and how this concept with its different aspects, is shaped through local discourses, on the one hand, and the global challenges, on the other hand. Therefore, reviewing the characteristics of regionalism based on the pioneers’ view and its approaches due to its mediation role between tradition and modernism in contemporary buildings in Mashhad can be considered as a discipline for identity crisis in Mashhad. Employing a mixed method, research design was based on deductive logic and through library sources and case studies. In this line, 27 prominent bulidings in Mashhad were selected as statistical population. A questionnaire was designed in a Likert scale and were answered by 25 experts in the same field in Mashhad. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. The results indicate that the principles of regionalism in Mashhad are not compatible with the contemporary needs because they are more of a symbolic and historical extensions to the modern facade and can be considered as the worst kind of regionalism in which images of traditionalism are combined with the imitations of past stereotypesand draw on the bodies of modern buildings.