The Role of Shade in Persian Garden, The Study of Thermal Comfort Conditions in Jahannama and Delgosha gardens

Since the advent of modern methods and new constructional approaches in architecture and landscape architecture, traditional architecture techniques which were based on utilizing natural energies have been completely set aside. In this case, the art of Iranian gardening has a great deal of valuable achievements and experiences which need to be reconsidered. Owing to its special geographic situation, the city of Shiraz includes a number of globally well-known gardens such as Eram, Jahannama, and Delgosha garden. As long as Persian gardens are considered as important parts of open and green spaces and urban landscapes in cities, the main purpose of this paper is the study of their structural features along with the role they play in improving environmental quality and comfort conditions. From this point of view in Landscape architecture, a quantitative-qualitative study was performed for the first time based on two distinct samples of Persian garden, Jahannama and Delgosha, to evaluate the thermal conditions of the garden's microclimate compared with the local climate and surrounding urban environment in extreme summer heat as well as intense winter cold. In this research, the latest assessment index of the open space thermal condition named the universal thermal climate index (UTCI) has been employed to evaluate the obtained data on January 24th and 25th of 2013 and July 31th and August 4th of 2014. Field data has been collected by mobile weather forecast facilities capable of recording temperature, humidity, wind, air pressure, and radiation temperature on the pre-set grid in both gardens. Final results obtained by extracting data from meteorological stations and the achieved data indicated that the structural features of the samples can highly mitigate the microclimate condition against local climate as well as short-term and long-term climate of the city. So, the main achievement of the present study is determining the role of Persian garden in improving the quality of microclimate and local climate as well as investigating the role of garden's components in enhancing thermal comfort conditions inside it.