The Historical Urban Fabric of Yazd City

Yazd with the unique architecture of desert region environment is recognized as the most significant rammed earth city in the world. It is one of the Iran’s major cities and to be known as a universal, remarkable cultural heritage which is developed and grown based on the principles of Iranian-Islamic architecture. The most significant characteristic in the design of Iranian-Islamic cities, in general, is the geographical location of bāzār and mosques. These two critical urbanistic features in Iranian cities are replaced by the three-part main urban elements (Arg, Sharestan, and Rabaz) of pre-Islamic urbanization. Islamic urbanization theoretically founded upon Islamic beliefs, ideology, and religious needs of Islamic culture. Friday mosque and bāzār have been indicating a unique unity and solidarity to cities atmosphere and are considering as inseparable and indivisible elements within the city- fabric. Moreover, mosque and bāzār symbolize the interrelationship between religion and economy, implying the notion of belonging to God, and signifying the relationship between people and the rulers. Each one of these features in addition to provoking the complex, formal sense of faithful unity supporting many other multi-dimensional functions which each one is influencing on the formation of city-fabric, to the extent that during the development and expansion of towns mosque and bāzār are considering as coherent elements in the process of development. In this regard, the oldest portion of Yazd city is recognized as a prominent area concerning cohesive contextual elements, which had not been constructed far from the Friday mosque and bāzār of Yazd. In this paper, the historic urban-fabric of Yazd has been briefly described.

Keywords: Iran, Yazd, Urban Design, Architecture, Friday Mosque, Bāzār