Visually meaningful sustainability in national monuments as an international heritage

•Visual parameters are efficient in enhancing the national monument complexes quality.•Morphology, Visual Indicators, and Visual Sequence are necessary for visual richness.•Visually meaningful sustainability causes enhancing visual richness quality. National monument complexes play an important role in a country and are considered the most important urban elements. These elements are first perceived by the eyes. Therefore, visual perception is effective during one’s first encounter and first impression about a place. This article attempts to discover and study the factors that help the visual richness of a national monument complex. These factors include essential qualities for presentation, use of visually meaningful identity, display of certain elegance to all people, and consecutive views. For this purpose, available theoretical sources are used, visual quality indicators are identified and categorized as practical concepts, and several samples from around the world are analyzed descriptively and statistically. This study is conducted based on a descriptive–analytical and logical reasoning method. Results indicate that we can design a national monument complex with visual richness or enhance the visual qualities of an old complex, which will be presented as a national monument complex, by considering items, such as complex morphology (form, shape, stability, and development method), visually meaningful sustainability indicators (contextual and practical factors), aesthetics, and visual sequencing (layered structure, level difference, and kinesthetic aspect of passage).