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Highlights• The biophilic design approach has potential benefits in extreme cold climates, especially for Nordic occupants.• Lighting design should be developed to deal with the challenging state of living and working in northern latitudes.• Non-image-forming effects of light have become the missing link between human needs and lighting design standards.• Adaptive envelopes should be developed to optimize biophilic quality and fulfil the photobiological needs of Nordic people.

As the main concern in sustainability is consideration to climatic conditions, climatically compatible design is the closest way of getting the maximum advantage of renewable sources of energy, while at the same time the design minimizes the undesirable effects of the construction in the environment and causes coordination with sustainability. From this point of view, the Bushehr traditional fabric, which is located in northern side of the Persian Gulf shore in south of Iran, is distinguished as a city with a unique vernacular architecture and climatically adapted urban design. Climatic design in Bushehr traditional city is seen in several characteristics including urban morphology and urban orientation, as well as architectural design and architectural elements of buildings such as Shenashir. The main reason of using all these solutions and strategies in vernacular architecture of Bushehr was to be adapted to climatic condition (a hot and humid climate) and therefore using the environmental potential to provide comfort for its occupants, which are the main purposes of sustainable development. As a result, this research attends to investigate these climatic solutions and their advantages as an idea to develop and use in contemporary architecture in order to reach sustainability. To this end, qualitative methodology based on a descriptive-interpretative approach is applied in this research for analyzing appropriate climatic solutions in vernacular architecture of Bushehr.

Space and place are among the fundamental concepts in architecture about which many discussions have been held and the complexity and importance of these concepts were focused on. This research has introduced an approach to better cognition of the architectural concepts based on theory and method of semiology in linguistics. Hence, at first the research investigates the concepts of space and place and explains their characteristics in architecture. Then, it reviews the semiology theory and explores its concepts and ideas. After obtaining the principles of theory and also the method of semiology, they are redefined in an architectural system based on an adaptive method. Finally, the research offers a conceptual model which is called the semiology approach by considering the architectural system as a system of signs. The approach can be used to decode the content of meanings and forms and analyses of the architectural mechanism in order to obtain its meanings and concepts. In this way and based on this approach, the residential architecture of the traditional city of Bushehr-Iran was analyzed as a case of study and its concepts were extracted. The results of this research demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in structure detection and identification of an architectural system. Besides, this approach has the capability to be used in processes of sustainable development and also be a basis for deconstruction of architectural texts. The research methods of this study are qualitative based on comparative and descriptive analyses.

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