USTAINABLE HOUSING AND FLEXIBILITY PATTERNS IN THE RESIDENTIAL COMPLEXES

In today’s constructions, the sustainable development is considered as one of the important issues. The sustainable development of housing is attention to the needs of the future generations along with meeting the current housing needs of the society members. Designing the flexible residence is one of the critical points in the goals of the sustainable architecture. Today, with changing the life style and family structure, the needs of individuals for the residential areas is changing. Therefore, the previous house of a family is no longer suitable for its future and the lack of attention to the issue of flexibility will have some problems over time including low lifetime and inappropriate functional yield of the building and environmental problems. With an approach to the Iran’s previous residential architecture and its design style and responsiveness to the performance and the needs of residence, it had created comfort in itself. This responsiveness is investigated in three procedures: adaptability, variability and diversity. In the current buildings, four key factors support the long-term flexibility: 1- depth of building, 2- accessibility of the building, 3- building height, 4- the level of the building’s occupancy that each one plays a role in the form of an effective factor in the flexibility of the building. This study, using a qualitative approach and taking advantage of library research to answer the questions, and owing to the past architecture and today’s valuable solutions, aims to achieve an effective result for the sustainability of the buildings from the physical-functional dimension during the time

residential complex, sustainability, flexibility, time