1 THE ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS APPLIED FOR DESIGN ANALYSIS

Being an intelligent activity, design is a complex process to accomplish. The complexity stems from the elusive character of this activity, which cannot be explained in precise terms, in general. In a design process, the determined relationships among the design elements provide important informa-tion to understand the role of each element with respect to others thereby improving the design. For this aim the method of analytical hierarch process (AHP) is employed which provides hierarchical priorities of the design elements with respect to the parsed design goal. The priority information is extended to establish hierarchical relations among the elements as a novel approach to employ in architectural design process