Maremat & Me'mari-e Iran

Development of the architecture profession in recent years has led to the quantitative development
of architecture schools. While much attention has been given to quantitative aspects of
such educational spaces, their quality has been neglected. This paper concentrates on two key
questions: (1) what are the desirable and acceptable characteristics of educational spaces from the
architecture students’ point of view? And (2) does the architecture of existing educational spaces
have satisfactory acceptability and desirability? This study aims to identify factors affecting the
quality of the architecture schools from their students’ perspective. This study is an empirical, descriptive,
and applied research in which we conducted a survey to collect data on the case studies.
In structural equation modeling between the latent variables of the study, two types of factors
have been studied: the physical, functional, and perceptual-semantic factors are considered as the
qualitative components of the educational spaces and on the other hand, standard satisfaction and
acceptability factors of the architecture schools which influencing the preferences of the students,
explain the structure of the models. The results of our findings indicate that the weakness of the
architecture schools in terms of functional component is related to the proportions between form
and function of the school, as for the physical component it is related to architectural values, and
in case of perceptual-semantic factors the interior design of the school is identified. Moreover,
the result of multivariate regression analysis reveals that among the effects of the physical, functional,
and perceptual-semantic factors, the functional factor is most effective. Therefore, paying
attention to the characteristics of the proportion between form and function in the design of architecture
schools is a priority.