Tareef Hayat Khan has so far published three books as single author, four books as co-authors with his students, and has edited two books.
This book is a product of several academic research projects conducted through different courses from undergraduate to postgraduate levels by the students of the department of architecture in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. As a supervisor, I found several topics of research by my students to have potential to be published as they provided some interesting and context-specific analysis. As a result, I converted selected reports to book chapters. It was not easy to compress a big report to relatively smaller chapters without sacrificing the essence of the project. However, I think a collective effort from authors and reviewers made it possible. The focus of these research projects was housing. However, it chose three major aspects related to housing. Culture plays an intangible role in housing, environmental aspects play a relatively tangible role while technology always has an impact on the built-form and the services. The book chapters indicated the role of these variables in the different context and in different degrees in a way that a wide range of readers would find it interesting and useful.
The Pleasant walking environment is a precondition for living in a sustainable city. However, the adequacy and the quality of physical elements as the most significant components of a street can seriously affect Walkability in the streets. Historically, streets were always pedestrian, but in this motor age, many of them lost that walkable environment. The objective of this study was to critically assess the Walkability of Mawlawi Street, a famous street in the historic city of Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. Qualitative interviews, Quantitative Questionnaire, and Direct Observations were conducted on four broader areas of Walkability, namely, Streetscape, Pedestrian Facilities, Road Attributes, and Walking Environment. The findings were validated through an interview with local experts. The study showed that inadequate and poor quality of street’s physical elements changed the street to an unsafe and uncomfortable environment for walking with a weak and low level of street connectivity and accessibility for pedestrians. Insensitive response to Walkability can always endanger the essence of historic streets, and this study attempted to raise that concern once more.
Terrace Row Housing Estate is the major typology of housing in urban Malaysia. The model is heavily car prioritized with little or no concern on pedestrian activity. While tropical climate can be blamed for people’s lack of interest in the pedestrian activity, it is already a proven phenomenon in many other parts of the world that pedestrian activity is not only good for health, but it can also generate community bonding. A strong community can ensure security inside neighborhoods as a by-product. In the current model of terrace row housing estates, back lanes remain as an essential part. However, recent studies showed that the relevance of back lanes are not so significant anymore. The underused back lanes in thousands of older terrace houses give a negative image of the estates. This study took the opportunity to combine these two issues, and proposed retrofitting back lanes into pedestrian zones. In fact, this trend is getting popularized in some parts of the country as gradually people are understanding the benefits. Through a survey of residents, this study came up with an ideological concept of how to retrofit back lanes which can also be economically feasible. However, it went one step beyond and proposed to connect all the back lanes in the neighborhoods in order to create a traffic-free pedestrian network. That not only can create a lively environment with children and elderlies moving freely inside the neighborhood but also can improve the image of the neighborhood, as back lanes will not be considered as a black spot. That can also contribute to the property market as prices can go up due to this concept of retrofitting.
Architecture is a multifaceted discipline. To some it is a socio-cultural object, to some, it is a physical object with much consideration on environmental issues, to some it is an image making element, to some architecture is about cognitive issues, to some it is a business-oriented venture, while there are others who consider it as a mixture of them. While we cannot ignore the existence of all of them dominant in architecture, we can argue that a particular perspective can provide deeper insight into the particular issue. Specific methods can be applied to investigate those issues individually without ignoring the others. Therefore, architectural methods have a very wide range. This book consists of five chapters that address few of them. It is a joint venture by the faculty staffs of the Department of Architecture, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), where they have shared their expertise and interests on methods that can be used in Architecture. This book is consequently titled as ‘Architectural Methodology’. The five chapters were arranged in a sequence. The first chapter that searched for the symbolic meaning of built forms considered architecture as a cultural object, while the second chapter that evaluated thermal comfort of buildings considered architecture as a physical object and tangible part of the built environment. The third chapter considered architecture as a cognitive process rather than demanding it to be as a mere product. While these three chapters discussed methods of perceiving architecture from three different ontological perspectives, chapter four and five attempted slightly different approaches to investigate architectural methods. Chapter four tried to capture methods of presenting architecture from the context of design studio, which is the baking point of all ideas; while chapter five considered architecture as a part of a macro urban environment. In a way, the first three chapters can be complemented with the latter two chapters that provided the visible physical boundary that starts from where architecture is born to where they ultimately belong in the bigger context of the civilization of this world.
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