Vernacular houses in Yazd: Natural elements

Given more than seven thousand years of urbanization and highly diverse topographic and geographical conditions, Iran is one of the treasures through the world's architectural history. Climatic diversity, on the one hand, and long history of living, on the other hand, has led to noteworthy and valuable achievement in architecture and urbanization within this country. However, these elements are less utilized in today architecture. Urban life, technological advances and excessive economical demands have extremely made people apart from the nature and formed their mind within an iterative mechanized order. Furthermore, human being is a part of nature and his/ her close relationship to the nature provides him/her with survival and longevity. In Iranian houses, a space indicating relationship between human and nature is courtyard. Central courtyards within vernacular houses in Yazd provided inhabitants with terrific living conditions and enhanced their living quality by utilizing natural elements such as water, wind, light, and plants. Today, due to providing more houses regardless of their quality, not only are natural elements ignored in human life; but also in many cases, buildings do not have essential features of living. This paper attempts to explore how to create and enter natural elements in apartments. This paper aims to investigate natural elements on vernacular houses in Yazd. A descriptive, analytic methodology along with a case study (vernacular houses in Yazd) were employed and data was collected through library and field research