Recognition of a Desert Garden through the Lens of Landscape Sustainability Case Study: of Shazdeh Garden in Mahan, Iran

Document Type : Case Study

Author

Department of Architecture, Roudehen Branch, Islamic Azad University,Roudehen ,Tehran,Iran

Abstract

The Persian garden as a symbol of a traditional Iranian landscape has a millennia-long history. A variety of factors contributes to create the historical phenomenon of which environmental sustainability is the important one. Although, the Persian gardens have been investigated from different perspectives Knowledge about the sustainable perspective of these gardens is limited. Despite the importance of sustainability in traditional Iranian landscape, available studies have not examined the Persian gardens through the lens of sustainability. This paper scrutinizes the parameters of environmental sustainability in the historical garden of Shazdeh in the arid city of Mahan as a selected case study. The main aim of this study is analyzing the elements and design principles of Shazdeh garden in order to identify the features of sustainable landscape architecture. To this purpose, the selected research method in this paper is descriptive-analytical, which according to the type of research, study and data collection are the combination of these two qualitative and quantitative methods. In this regard, first, the qualitative method is used to examine the parameters of sustainable landscape in the hot and arid climate. Then, both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to investigate and evaluate the effects of sustainability factors on the main elements of Shazdeh Garden which include natural elements (water, vegetation), and built elements (pavilion). The results show that understanding the characteristics of sustainable landscaping in arid regions plays a key role in creating the physical models, spatial organization, and composition of elements of Shazdeh Garden.

Keywords


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