Architects today rarely incorporate appendages into their designs. Such additions muddle and obscure the main idea of the project. Contemporary architecture is expected to present its core idea clearly and at first glance; appendages blur that image.
When a contemporary architect identifies a problem — whether climatic, social, or functional — they try to embed the solution within the building's primary structure and form. The solution either becomes the main design idea, or it is so seamlessly integrated that it doesn't disturb the main concept.
Shanashir is the complete opposite of this.
Imagine you design a central courtyard and arrange rooms in two stories around it. The air is hot and oppressively humid. You need airflow. The higher you go from the ground, the more effective the wind becomes. So you make the upper-floor windows large and full-height, facing the wind, to let more breeze in. But several problems arise.
First, there's the danger of falling. So you add railings in front of the windows. But railings don't block passersby's view into the rooms. So you make the railings solid with small openings — which contradicts the full-height windows and blocks the wind. What is the solution?
Move the railing slightly away from the window. Make the solid portion louvered, angling the slats toward the room and downward so the wind flows better into the interior. Add a sloped roof above. And just like that — shanashir is born.
A wooden appendage, 80 to 90 centimeters wide, running the full length of the facade — generally oriented toward the wind — with louvered railings. You can even tilt the individual wooden louvers horizontally to channel more wind inside. And a sloped roof on top.
This wooden appendage provides several other benefits: it casts shade over the passageway and ground-floor walls below, and it creates a corridor allowing you to move from room to room — or pass alongside an adjacent room — without entering it.
Inside the courtyard, shanashir runs along the perimeter, providing both circulation and shade for the rooms below. The courtyard-facing shanashir railings, since they don't have the problem of being viewed from below, are not louvered — just thin wooden lines that present the least obstruction to airflow.
Shanashir is not unique to Bushehr. It exists in cities of other countries — in Iraq (where it is called shanashil), in Egypt, India, and some European countries like Turkey and Spain, under different names. But this appendage, through its effectiveness in Bushehr's climate and its repetition across Bushehr houses, has created an iconic image of the city. If you picture a Bushehr house in your mind, probably the first image that comes to you is the shanashir. Yet if you draw or examine the floor plan of these houses, the central courtyard, surrounding rooms, and open spaces like the tarmeh are so dominant that the shanashir probably wouldn't even appear.