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Searching for Urban and Architectural Core Forms in the Traditional Najdi Built Environment of the Central Region of Saudi Arabia.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Searching for Urban and Architectural Core Forms in the Traditional Najdi Built Environment of the Central Region of Saudi Arabia./
Author:	Alnaim, Mohammed Mashary.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2020,
Description:	516 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-01, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International82-01A.
Subject:	Architecture. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=27740315
ISBN:	9798607349271

Searching for Urban and Architectural Core Forms in the Traditional Najdi Built Environment of the Central Region of Saudi Arabia.
Alnaim, Mohammed Mashary.

Searching for Urban and Architectural Core Forms in the Traditional Najdi Built Environment of the Central Region of Saudi Arabia. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2020 - 516 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-01, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Colorado at Denver, 2020.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

The sudden shift of Saudi cities to modernity in the 1950s makes it difficult for the local people and decision-makers, who were fascinated by the new ideas, to appreciate their local building heritage. This resulted in abandoning traditions and culture in terms of the traditional way of living of the Saudi people. In reaction to this shift, the traditional Najdi built environment became an intriguing subject to examine and in the past fifty years numerous books, articles, theses, etc., have dealt with central region traditional architecture. However, such studies focused on the final product with a few references to how traditional values contributed to the production of the physical forms. This dissertation offers a new approach to understanding Saudi Arabia's rich architectural legacy by exploring this built environment from the perspective of the process of making the urban and architectural forms to understand those forms beyond their mere physical appearance to go deeper: to identify the processes that generated the urban and architectural forms and defined their visual shapes, the shared socio-cultural values, beliefs and religious convictions, along with other factors such as the natural environment, that drove those processes that resulted in the built environment of the traditional settlements.The goal of this dissertation is to explore the traditional Najdi built environment and its culture to identify its rich past to present a new way of thinking about how to recreate and value the past and rebalance the superficial architectural identity of the Kingdom. In that sense, the main purpose here is to explore the Core Concepts and Forms of the traditional architecture and their cultural meanings in Najd, the central region of Saudi Arabia five settlements Ad-Diriya, Sudus, Alkhabra, Ushaiqer, and old Riyadh. I argue that the Core Concepts and Forms are not necessarily meant to describe or specify a form appearance as the form can be a manifestation that is developed over time of different related components and constraints within the built form.In analyzing the architectural details of Najdi built environment, deciphering the meaning behind the aesthetics and the process of making of each architectural element, I discovered a hidden order. This hidden order, I call "The Integrative Spatial and Physical Order." I argue that this hidden order is based on how the inhabitants of each built environment responded to the surrounding environmental conditions and how the inhabitants accommodated their different daily life needs by using the operational Core Concepts and Forms. Therefore, this dissertation examines the meanings implicit in the architectural forms from the perspective of socio-cultural values, religious convictions, natural environment, and local know-how of building materials and techniques to collectively understand the symbolic representational aspects embodied within the built environment. The objective is to determine the embedded processes and meanings inherent in the traditional urban and architectural Core Concepts and Forms in Najd.This dissertation offers a model and methodology to examine and document the traditional Najdi built environment. The study makes use of Space Syntax analytical techniques, graphical architectural analysis, and a symbolic approach as the analytical methods to identify this dissertation's goals and objectives. Also, the study develops a vertical and horizontal model to segment the complexity of the Najdi built environment into three analytical levels: urban, building, architectural element. Where the intent of the vertical model is to examine each analytical level at each case individually, the intent of the horizontal model is to examine each analytical level across-cases. These models led and guided the analysis to identify the most repetitive Core Forms in the traditional Najdi built environment. The significance of the models, however, are that they drove the research to not simply focus on Core Forms in individual cases, but rather to look more broadly to identify the Core Forms that characterized the region as a whole at the urban, building and architectural element levels. The findings of this research, then, suggests that redefining the operational Core Concepts and Forms in terms of strength is essential to identifying how local inhabitants used the hidden order as tools to maintain their built environment's characteristics over time.Forty operational Core Concepts and Forms identified. This dissertation presents a hierarchical ranking of the Core Concepts and Forms into four categories: Constant, Semi-constant, Semi-flexible, and Flexible Core Concepts and Forms. I argue that the organizational aspect of the hierarchy is designed to help appreciate each Core Form by understanding its effect on a certain cultural phenomenon through simplifying its complexity. This, I believe, can help architects, decision-makers, educators, professionals, and others make use of the study's findings related to the Core Concepts and Forms of the Najdi settlements to direct the identity of future architecture and urban design in the central region in particular Saudi built environments in general, and possibly even in built environments elsewhere around the world that share cultural and environmental characteristics similar to those of the Najdi settlements.

ISBN: 9798607349271Subjects--Topical Terms:

523581
Architecture.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Core Form

Searching for Urban and Architectural Core Forms in the Traditional Najdi Built Environment of the Central Region of Saudi Arabia.
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520 $a The sudden shift of Saudi cities to modernity in the 1950s makes it difficult for the local people and decision-makers, who were fascinated by the new ideas, to appreciate their local building heritage. This resulted in abandoning traditions and culture in terms of the traditional way of living of the Saudi people. In reaction to this shift, the traditional Najdi built environment became an intriguing subject to examine and in the past fifty years numerous books, articles, theses, etc., have dealt with central region traditional architecture. However, such studies focused on the final product with a few references to how traditional values contributed to the production of the physical forms. This dissertation offers a new approach to understanding Saudi Arabia's rich architectural legacy by exploring this built environment from the perspective of the process of making the urban and architectural forms to understand those forms beyond their mere physical appearance to go deeper: to identify the processes that generated the urban and architectural forms and defined their visual shapes, the shared socio-cultural values, beliefs and religious convictions, along with other factors such as the natural environment, that drove those processes that resulted in the built environment of the traditional settlements.The goal of this dissertation is to explore the traditional Najdi built environment and its culture to identify its rich past to present a new way of thinking about how to recreate and value the past and rebalance the superficial architectural identity of the Kingdom. In that sense, the main purpose here is to explore the Core Concepts and Forms of the traditional architecture and their cultural meanings in Najd, the central region of Saudi Arabia five settlements Ad-Diriya, Sudus, Alkhabra, Ushaiqer, and old Riyadh. I argue that the Core Concepts and Forms are not necessarily meant to describe or specify a form appearance as the form can be a manifestation that is developed over time of different related components and constraints within the built form.In analyzing the architectural details of Najdi built environment, deciphering the meaning behind the aesthetics and the process of making of each architectural element, I discovered a hidden order. This hidden order, I call "The Integrative Spatial and Physical Order." I argue that this hidden order is based on how the inhabitants of each built environment responded to the surrounding environmental conditions and how the inhabitants accommodated their different daily life needs by using the operational Core Concepts and Forms. Therefore, this dissertation examines the meanings implicit in the architectural forms from the perspective of socio-cultural values, religious convictions, natural environment, and local know-how of building materials and techniques to collectively understand the symbolic representational aspects embodied within the built environment. The objective is to determine the embedded processes and meanings inherent in the traditional urban and architectural Core Concepts and Forms in Najd.This dissertation offers a model and methodology to examine and document the traditional Najdi built environment. The study makes use of Space Syntax analytical techniques, graphical architectural analysis, and a symbolic approach as the analytical methods to identify this dissertation's goals and objectives. Also, the study develops a vertical and horizontal model to segment the complexity of the Najdi built environment into three analytical levels: urban, building, architectural element. Where the intent of the vertical model is to examine each analytical level at each case individually, the intent of the horizontal model is to examine each analytical level across-cases. These models led and guided the analysis to identify the most repetitive Core Forms in the traditional Najdi built environment. The significance of the models, however, are that they drove the research to not simply focus on Core Forms in individual cases, but rather to look more broadly to identify the Core Forms that characterized the region as a whole at the urban, building and architectural element levels. The findings of this research, then, suggests that redefining the operational Core Concepts and Forms in terms of strength is essential to identifying how local inhabitants used the hidden order as tools to maintain their built environment's characteristics over time.Forty operational Core Concepts and Forms identified. This dissertation presents a hierarchical ranking of the Core Concepts and Forms into four categories: Constant, Semi-constant, Semi-flexible, and Flexible Core Concepts and Forms. I argue that the organizational aspect of the hierarchy is designed to help appreciate each Core Form by understanding its effect on a certain cultural phenomenon through simplifying its complexity. This, I believe, can help architects, decision-makers, educators, professionals, and others make use of the study's findings related to the Core Concepts and Forms of the Najdi settlements to direct the identity of future architecture and urban design in the central region in particular Saudi built environments in general, and possibly even in built environments elsewhere around the world that share cultural and environmental characteristics similar to those of the Najdi settlements.
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