An Analytical Approach to the Invitation quality of Contemporary Mosques (Case Study: Mosques of Tehran)

There were the glorious examples of the architecture of mosque once in Iran.They were the places for equality between all classes, so they must have qualities for invitation, guidance, and reminder and call the believers and attract other followers of religions as the missionary of Islam. This invitation is not only in the field of vision, but also in terms of audio and other means, such as multi-functionality, centrality, and location of deployment. This architecture was considered to be the main factor in identifying the complexes of Muslims due to its comprehensiveness, importance, severalty and high status in the past times, But today it has lost its inviting role because of structural changes. In contemporary times, as well as the changes in the structure of the city, due to the changing needs and functions of the mosques, as well as the distinction with dimensions and their location in the urban structure and economic constraints, the goals and characteristics of the mosques were also forgotten; So that today all the social groups have reacted from citizens and worshipers to architects and urban designers. Paying attention to the Invitation role of the mosques forms the central idea of the present paper. It is one of the pillars of urban design and planning in contemporary city centers and neighborhoods. All aspects of the invitation in the body, function and meaning are important in this research. The present paper addresses this question: How can we use the physical, functional and semantic components of the mosques to enhance the quality of the invitation on the urban and local scale, the entrance view, as well as the interior space of the building. This paper is looking for the optimal design process. In this regard, using the content analysis methodology, we are going to refresh the actions and theories in the field of related topics. We are presented a desirable process to promote the quality of the invitation of contemporary mosques by achieving a conceptual and applied framework. We elaborate the subject by selecting 8 examples of contemporary Tehran mosques. We analyses the elements affecting the general form of the building, the external walls, the design and the entrance and the interior space of the mosques by referring to library resources and field observations. The results of the analysis show that an ideal set of physical factors to semantic components affects mosque admission that has a significant effect on the enhancement of the presence of the individual and the community. These results categorizes and describes in terms of criteria of visibility and centrality in urban scale, admission and guidance in middle-level scale, meaningfulness and visual memory in the outer walls and the entrance perspective, convergence and spatial regulation in the interior space of the mosques.