Cognitive-emotional feasibility of the effect of visual quality of building form on promoting the sense of place attachment (Case study: Cultural iconic buildings of Iran’s contemporary architecture)

Abstract

The present research studies the relationship between place attachment and the perception of form’s visual quality in fifteen outstanding contemporary Iranian architectural cultural buildings. This study puts forward the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the quality of building form and the sense of place attachment, in the sense that creating high visual quality through enhancing the quality of building form increases citizens’ initial satisfaction with and subsequent attachment to the building. High visual quality influences people’s experience of the environment and improves the quality of life. Place attachment highlights how people, on a personal level, recreate a sense of place for themselves. The present study adopts the descriptive-analytical method as its theoretical framework and the survey as the empirical methodology. Questionnaires were developed using the Likert scale and distributed among experts and ordinary citizens. Data analysis using SPSS and the adoption of descriptive-analytical statistics, correlation analysis, and regression showed the relationship among the characteristics of indicators. The results show a positive correlation between form and place attachment mediated through visual quality, and they are causal conditions for one another. In addition, only some of the buildings under study evoke the same level of place attachment.

Key words： Visual preferences; Environmental quality; Environmental psychology; Mental schemas; Contemporary architecture