Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background & Objectives: Standards are the first reference designers use to make high–quality spaces. Hence, it is necessary to pay attention to the quality indicators of architecture in formulating criteria and standards. Since people with special needs experience many barriers and discriminations in the building environment, architectural standards and design criteria related to these people must regard all aspects of qualitative architectural indicators to meet their special needs. This issue is more important in designing educational spaces because children spend much time in schools, and the physical environment must be appropriate for achieving educational goals. Therefore, to maintain and improve the quality of the educational spaces and achieve the goals of the educational system, critique and evaluation of standards and design criteria are necessary to eliminate existing defects. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to investigate architectural quality indicators and the second one is to analyze the degree of attention to each indicator with regard to the educational spaces standards for children with special needs.

Methods: The present research method is descriptive and, in terms of purpose, applied research conducted with content analysis method. At the first step, based on the library resources and nine architecture experts views, the quality indicators of architecture were identified and classified according to their characteristics and dimensions. Then, a researcher–made checklist was prepared and finalized after a comprehensive evaluation and supervision of experts in this field. They eliminated similar or duplicate cases and reached 34 sub–components and categorized them under 5 general concepts. The study’s statistical population was the 734 issue of the Planning and Budget Organization journal. The sample size of the whole text was Chapter 4 (educational space design recommendations). To analyze the qualitative data, coding was done in three stages: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. William Scott’s formula was used to measure the reliability of the research tool. The reliability coefficient for all components was more than 65%. The formal validity of the research was also confirmed by nine professors of architecture. The coding was performed in SPSS software and the obtained data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequency calculation, percentage, valid percent, cumulative percentage).

Results: Findings showed that the qualitative indicators of architecture could be described in two general categories of objective indicators with subcategories of physical properties, performance, and construction, and subjective indicators with subcategories of environmental quality and semantic quality. From 466 coded content, objective criteria with 95.1% were far more emphasized than subjective criteria with 4.9%. Attention to function criteria as one of the sub–categories of objective indicators was 51% more than other sub–categories, i.e., physical properties and construction in this field. Of 226 coded content assigned to performance as one of the objective criteria, safety was considered one of the sub–categories of performance criteria with 26.1%, which was much higher than other subcategories. Of 120 coded content assigned to construction as one of the objective criteria, attention to equipment and construction facilities as one of the subcategories of construction with 64.2% was much greater than other subcategories. Of 97 coded content assigned to the physical properties as one of the objective criteria, attention to dimensions and size (geometry and proportions) as one of the subcategories of the body criterion with 61.9% was much greater than the other subcategories. In subjective criteria, environmental quality was emphasized 100% more than semantic quality. The subcategories of environmental quality such as exceptional child psychology and peace were referred to with 39.1%, much more than safety, aesthetics, and happiness with 4.3%. Also, cultural and social values were ignored. The category of semantic quality and its subcategories such as the sense of place, individual identity, and spiritual aspect of place that puts architecture at the service of elevating the human soul and giving it originality and spirituality was neglected totally.

Conclusion: In architectural regulations and standards codification for children with special needs, attention has been paid to objective criteria and quantitative and functional aspects of space design. However, subjective criteria such as environmental quality and semantic quality as one of the most important factors affecting the quality of architecture, received less attention.