The Impact of Local Values on Façade Design; A Comparative Study on North Cyprus and Iran Contemporary Residential Buildings

Façade, is the most impacting connection between humans and the built environment. It is the outer shell of a building. Façade is not only a reflection of the architectural character of a region, it is also a representation of local cultural, social, climatic, political and economic circumstances. Urban space is characterized by buildings' façades, neighboring buildings` façades, streetscape and environment. In the recent years, following the modern movement and globalization phenomena, architects started using modern design features in buildings and façades without considering the local values, so this has led to the emergence of similar looking images in urban areas. Surely, this problem is associated more with highly populated cities and developing world countries. The clients and their architects demanded and therefore supplied more modern features in façades, so today’s building façades have continuously lost relations with their local origins and contextual surroundings. Façade design as a fundamental category of architecture should be constructed by proper considerations of the regions’ values and cultural characteristics. In this respect, investigating the local features of the particular region could lead architects use these features more in their facade designs where more respect to place identity. In this regard, attention to local values’ features in the symbolic and functional form is a gainful approach to keep the bond between place identity and modern houses. This thesis attempts to highlight some of the local factors in Cypriot and Iranian residential buildings as used in contemporary housing. For this purpose, the study focuses on local factors including climate, material, culture, site and facade explanation and its components for discovering the impact of these features on facade design within selected houses. Moreover, contemporary architectural periods of Cyprus and Iran have been scrutinized for learning the Cypriot and Iranian local factors and traditional housing features. Based on literature research, physical observation have been carried out in this study to reach comparative results. Based on findings, this study underlines some of the local features which have been used symbolically or functionally in contemporary houses façade of Cyprus and Iran. Keywords: Façade design, Local values, Residential Buildings, Contemporary Period