مقایسه‌ و سنجش مطلوبیت دو اثر معماری عمومی تئاتر شهر و پردیس سینمایی ملت، از دیدگاه شهر و حیات جمعی شهروندان

This article is about public architecture. Public buildings with the primary function of cultural or artistic activities are one of the most essential elements of today’s cities. They provide effective vibrant centers for public attendance and assembly, and also for their valuable collective activities, voluntary communications, and special events and ceremonies. So, they play a very efficient role in enriching the city’s artistic-cultural content and improving its social life and identity. Because of their memorial, cultural, and sometimes artistic natures, these buildings usually try to apply unique style and high-quality meritorious architecture, which usually originates from the society’s history, culture, traditions, future goals, wishes, values, and needs. But the most significant aspect of these buildings is their role in enhancing the quality of their surrounding environment, as a part of the city’s public realm and the stream of collective urban life related to it. Recognizing a building with public use as a part of the environment where it is located, and integrating the public building with its periphery and the surrounding land is a necessary task that can ensure increasing the guilty of the urban environment and collective life associated with the architectural element. This is exactly what is unfortunately often overshadowed by architectural debates on issues such as formal, aesthetic, and structural considerations, while it is impossible to evaluate correctly a public architectural work without recognizing its role in the urban citizens’ image, their everyday life, their collective experience, and their specific activities and attendance. It is truly remarkable how people perceive the new public building, how they feel about it, and how they use it in everyday life or their specific activities. These issues are very influential because they form public architecture’s visual and mental image, its role and position in the city, and its reputation as a perfect meaningful lovely public symbol, or on the contrary, a meaningless, ugly weird huge building! On this basis, this research tries to illustrate a useful, impartial criticism and evaluation of our current public architecture, based on its compatibility with the urban public realm and collective life. In this regard, it starts to study relative documents to extract physical and contextual criteria of favorable urban places. It helps to evaluate the favorability of public buildings, not from the architectural, aesthetic, or structural point of view, but from the urban life point of view, and based on their potential for creating good active urban focal points to attract peoples’ collective life and interactions. It is trying to answer this main question that which qualities can help a public building to create a live well-defined urban place around itself. To answer this question, the research identifies three components of a good urban place based on document review and theatrical analysis. These components are physical, operational, and social–experimental components. The research also identifies the criteria and indexes for each mentioned component. In the next stage, 15 experts were asked to rank these criteria and indexes based on their importance. So we achieved some points for each criterion and index based on the Delphi method and hierarchy analysis. After that, to develop this debate, the research compares the favorability of two famous cases of current public architecture in Tehran, first: the city theatre and second: The Mellat Cinema Complex, and evaluates them based on the previously mentioned criteria and indexes and their points. I adopted these two buildings because they are good representatives of Iranian modern architecture with similar functions, which refer to different styles, ideas, and periods. They are both new modern architectures in their time that adopted public uses relating to art and culture. They are both attractive architectural elements and have attractive uses for people. But they have different approaches to art, architecture, and the environment. So, this comparison can provide a good comprehensive recognition and analysis of the approaches toward place-making, urban life, and collective perception and satisfaction in our current public architecture and the evolution of these approaches over time. The results of this comparison and evaluation show that Tehran City Theatre is more favorable and compatible with human needs and social life. But Mellat Cinema Complex also acts well concerning some relevant criteria such as visual and physical permeability and social-experimental components and gets good points.