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A. Mahdavi:
"An empirical approach to the scientific study of traditional architecture";
Talk: International Conference on Patterning From Traditional Architecture to Access To Contemporary Architecture, Teheran, Iran; 2007-10-16 - 2007-10-17; in: "Sun still Shines", IAARA (ed.); (2007), #.

Traditional buildings around the world entail numerous intelligent design features, emerged and successively refined through the historical process of adjustment to local climatic conditions and social circumstances. To make this embodied design knowledge acessible to contemporary architecture, a thorough understanding of the working of such environmentally adapted buildings is necessary. Toward this end, general qualitative descriptions of the respective design strategies must be complemented with detailed performance analyses based on high-resolution empircial data. The present contribution introduces a systematic framework for andthe initial results of a research effort to obtain, analyze, and interpret data from traditional buildings. Specifically, an ongoing research effort is presented to collect local climate and building performance data regarding a number of traditional buildings in the Northern-African and Mediterranean countries.

Traditional buildings, building physics and ecology