RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE: EVALUATION of TENANTS' SATISFACTION in PRIVATE CULTURE

Abstract

This paper focuses on the significance of privacy in housing design for private cultures and analyses residential satisfaction of design. Furthermore, the paper presents the unique features of a traditional house in Islamic cultures, and the role it plays providing residents of these houses with the desired privacy along with the importance and the meaning of residential privacy in private cultures, and how the contemporary architecture respects the privacy achieved in the traditional Islamic housing. Mirbat town in the Sultanate of Oman is used as a case study for this research and builds on the authors' previous study of Mirbat's old and new residential quarters where the detailed study of the architecture of 102 traditional residences were conducted and assessed. Furthermore, two additional surveys of young and older residents (as focus groups) of traditional and contemporary housing in Mirbat were conducted to expand and strengthen the findings of the current research, which aimed to study residential satisfaction as it relates to different aspects of privacy and as a measure of evaluating residential quality. Through a comparison of old and new quarters of Mirbat, and traditional and contemporary residences, the authors expose the differences in design between the old and the new. Finally, the authors conclude that those unique features that were employed in traditional housing design are no longer employed in contemporary residences' design (or employed only as decorative elements) compromising the privacy of the residents.