Sustainable Designs between Traditional & Contemporary Architecture

• Main Authors: Shatha Y. Alsheikh, Bayda H. Saffo, Niam B. Manona
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ishik University 2020-06-01
• Series: Eurasian Journal of Science and Engineering
• Subjects: sustainable designs between traditional & contemporary architecture
• Online Access: https://eajse.tiu.edu.iq/index.php/volume-6-issue-1-article-10/

Research discusses the importance of sustainable designs and how to achieve them, not only as a new concept in contemporary architecture, but as an extension of technologies and thoughts related to traditional architecture and identity, where the elements of sustainable, spontaneous and implicit design have been integrated with the underlying conceptual thought, using local building materials and simple studied techniques derived from the spatial contexts. With the beginning of the third millennium, sustainable buildings were no longer considered as an academic luxury or purely theoretical trends, but they represented innovative patterns of applied global trends and professional practices, and their levels started to be formed, in the architectural and constructional sectors worldwide. Research problem has been formed by the unclear definition of the levels of achieving sustainable designs in each of the traditional architecture and its counterpart of the contemporary, and its objective has been determined by defining those levels. While research methodology has established a theoretical framework defining those levels with primary and secondary vocabularies, in traditional architecture according to: (the urban fabric, intellectual and design trends, architectural elements employed, and the current treatments to the elements), it has been found that the significant levels of achieving sustainability in contemporary architecture, include exploring two other levels, added to those four, concerning, the building performance aspects adding a new forth design dimension, “time”, and, the humanistic aspects, as well as the exploration of a primary vocabulary involved in the level of the intellectual and design trends. Those levels are then applied to a sample of contemporary sustainable design projects to explore their utilization. It was concluded that the implicit levels of sustainable designs achievement of traditional architecture stemming from the identity of place, have set strong basis, continued to be employed in different procedures, in contemporary sustainable designs, reflecting the high-technological and innovative identity of the age, as well as, the activation of those levels, academically and practically in the context of design tasks.