Levels of Creative Addition and its Characteristics in Contemporary Iraqi Architecture

Abstract

Addition is regarded as one of the important concepts which has accompanied human culture from time memorial in its various aspects of thinking, science, and art.Thus, addition in architecture which represents a cultural product embodying man’s thought, his social needs and demands was reflected in theory and practice through different historical era. Each era added to the previous one something new and distinctive serving development and growth. At present, the importance of this concept has emerged after an increased call to invest in the heritage and re-employ it in new attempts after adding to it, thus achieving an architecture that keeps up with progress and development, as manifested in all fields of life.The issue of this paper pointed out the lack of knowledge a bout the creative nature of addition, which is connected to the designer in Contemporary Iraqi Architecture.Thus; the main goal of this research is to give the most efficient and clearest image to define this nature. The research has adopted four main steps which cover firstly theoretical study of creative product. Secondly, a comprehensive conceptual framework is built to describe creative nature of addition in architecture (its levels and characteristics). Thirdly, this framework is applied to selected examples of contemporary architecture in Iraq to extract the nature of creative addition. In this research we found the special feature of addition in contemporary Iraqi architectural products has been explored because it is a creative and inventive addition with derivative nature at the conceptual and physical levels, by adopting assembly technique to achieve original and appropriate addition taking into consideration theoretical content and the nature of form elements.