No abstract

The conservation of the architectural heritage has enjoyed a long course of development over the recent decades. Conservation practice is based on the values offered by the architectural heritage resources for different individuals, groups, societies, and governments. Since there is no serious and comprehensive research on the semantic values, the present study was conducted to identify all the influential semantic values in the architectural conservation process and to determine the importance of each value based on the published literature. To this end, more than 100 scientific documents, statements, and charters were analyzed and then, 40 semantic values were identified. The snowball sampling method was used to select the papers. In this study, the qualitative content analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between the architectural heritage and conservation, and the quantitative content analysis was used to assess the relationship between the semantic values and conservation. According to the results of the content analysis, it can be concluded that the conservation of architectural heritage can be investigated and analyzed at three levels: people, experts, and governments, and the holistic conservation of the architectural heritage can be achieved only by the joint cooperation among all the three levels. Also, the results showed that the cultural value, economic value, historical value, and identity greatly influence the semantic conservation of the architectural heritage.

Ice-blasting (frozen CO2 at minus 78.5 ºC) is one of the modern methods of cleaning for industrial purposes without any contamination or hazard to the environment. Effects of ice-blasting were studied here on the basis of normal solid wood as well as nanosilver-impregnated Populus nigra and Fagus orientalis. The size range of silver nanoparticles was 20 - 90 nm. Specimens were free from any knots,  splits, rot, or other visual defects. Results showed that ice-blasting made impact strength decrease in beech by 8.4 %; however, an insignificant increase of 0.8 % was observed in poplar. Impregnating the specimens with a nanosilver suspension before ice-blasting made impact strength increase by 25.8 % in poplar; it also mitigated the impact loss in beech (5.2 % in comparison to control specimens). It can be concluded that the negative effect of ice-blast treatment is less in lower-density poplar wood; also, impregnation with nanosilver can even increase its impact strength. In higher-density beech wood, however, the impregnation can mitigate the significant negative effect of the ice-blast treatment on impact bending strength.

Since the historical buildings undergo a lot of changes and damages in the course of history, they are required to be documented. These changes might come about as a result of natural symptoms like rainfall, wind, earthquake, flood, explosion and/or by human beings (consciously or unconsciously). Therefore, efforts should be made in line with 3D documenting such buildings so that, besides precise identification of the buildings' current status and the damages imposed to them during the time, the future changes and damages' trends could be predicted, so enables us to prevent their continuation. The documentation system is selected according to the dimensions of the object, the density of the required point clouds and accuracy. Regarding that the current methods for laser-based or photography-based (photogrammetry) 3D reconstruction are expensive or complex, cost-effective infrared sensors, such as the structure sensor and the Kinect sensor, have been introduced as promising alternative tools. An infrared scanner, as a portable depthsensing scanner, consists of a color sensor and a depth sensor that are capable of capturing color images and depths of objects in the visible and accessible range. These sensors are commonly referred to as RGB-D cameras because they output standard RGB images from the camera that have an additional Depth channel per pixel (Fig. 2). The most recent development of the infrared documentation system is the portable Structural Sensor provided by Occipital in collaboration with Prime Sense. This small, lightweight, wireless sensor directly collects and records point clouds data and create three-dimensional modeling of interiors. Structure sensor is a new technology in metric documentation; therefore, the capabilities of this system have not been evaluated for documenting cultural heritage. According to the error introduced for the structure sensor, the scanner has a precision of more than 99% in objects between 0.4 and 3.5 meters; therefore, it is suitable for heritage documentation. The main purpose of this research is, therefore, to verify this claim based on projects captured through experimental tests, in order to confirm the suitability of this tool for cultural heritage documentation. The historical house of Etemad al-Saltanah was documented (Fig. 8) and processed to experimentally examine the structure sensor, the results of which were compared with the actual dimensions of the house (Table 4). Results of the research showed that this system of documentation is not suitable for 3D capturing and reconstructing historical buildings and does not have the required and claimed level of precision (Table 5). Also, the structure sensor precision was assessed for documenting museum objects through testing the scale model of Imam Mosque in Isfahan, Iran (Fig. 11). Results (Table 6) indicate that the structure

Buildings should be constructed such that their energy efficiency is high in different climatic conditions while providing acceptable thermal comfort at the same time. Climatic and architectural incompatibilities will increase energy consumption to provide thermal comfort but have adverse effects, both economically and environmentally. Climatic design is the best and most effective way to maximize the use of renewable energy sources. Traditional Iranian houses have always exhibited this type of architecture and can provide suitable examples for design for contemporary architects. This study aimed to investigate the effect of building plan forms on the thermal comfort temperature in residential buildings with the help of traditional architectural patterns. The method of this research is descriptive-analytical and has been conducted through case studies and simulation tests. Data collection has been undertaken through literature review and field observations. The houses in this study were classified based on their building plan form. Ecotect and EnergyPlus software were used for modeling and Climate Consultant software was used for climate analysis. Findings reveal that the Building Coverage Ratio (BCR) and the introverted plan forms are two significant factors in climatic design to provide thermal comfort in the hot and dry climate of Iran. Among the investigated models, results show that the one-sided form with northeast-southwest orientation and northeast placement has the most hours (2609 h per year) in the range of thermal comfort and the best plan form among the studied forms.