Identifying the Preferences of Spatial Features in the Apartment Houses of Bandar Abbas, Emphasizing on the Lived Experience of the Residents

One of the important pillars of providing housing is to pay attention to the documented and reliable preferences of citizens, according to which it is possible to deal with the prescriptions and design solutions in the field of housing and residential environments. These documented preferences can be searched in the spatial features, but since there are a number of the spatial features in architecture researchers’ opinion, it is necessary to identify and measure each of them in housing filed. On the other hand, this research seeks to identify and clarify the spatial features of apartment houses in Bandar Abbas city based on the lived experience of the residents, and then evaluate each of the spatial features based on the lived experience of the residents. The research method has been chosen in terms of the fundamental goal, and the method of doing it is combined (qualitative-quantitative). Data collection was done using library studies and field observations including preparation of questionnaires, interviews. After formulating a proposed theoretical framework, with the help of the Delphi method and in-depth interviews with the residents, the preferences of the spatial features are verified, then the importance of each is evaluated and ranked by experts. The results obtained in this research show that there are 16 preferences for the spatial features of apartment houses based on the experience of the residents in Bandar Abbas city. These number of spatial features were measured based on their importance, and it was revealed that the feature of "spatial guidance" is more important in Bandar Abbas apartment houses compared to other identified spatial features and "space nostalgia" is of lower importance. Also, the spatial features are correctly placed in the "structural-functional" and "qualitative-psychological" categories according to experts' scoring and in-depth interviews of residents.