Pathology of urban appearance with emphasis on the power poles and solutions to improve it

One of the most important visual disturbance factors in most cities in Iran is the large number of wooden and concrete power poles. The dirty and old appearance of power poles and their disharmony in color and texture with surrounding urban environment, create a negative image in minds of the citizens. Power poles as one of the sources of visual disturbance and pollution, induce disorder, stress, inconcinnity and ugliness. So the study of visual quality of power poles and their role in improving the urban appearance is necessary. But in addition to improving the quality of urban appearance, widespread distribution of these poles in urban areas are also considerable in other aspects. So far, the only use of power poles is for supporting overhead conductors. But as this study shows, power poles can also have other functions. One of the reasons for going to study the various functions of power poles is the wide range of their audiences. Due to the large number of poles in urban streets, their audience community will develop and in terms of location, consists various social spectrums. This extensive audience community represents the commercial, touristic, cultural, social and aesthetic potential capacities of power poles. According to various urban textures like deteriorated, historical, touristic, residential and commercial textures, and distribution of power poles in all these tissues, six main functions for power poles can be imagined: artistic function, architecture-urbanism function, cultural function, social function, historical-touristic function and advertising function. The main objective of this research is to improve the visual quality of power poles with regard to each of these functions.