Mental Conceptions of Emergent Spaces in Architectural Design: Workshop at the First Conference on Design Computing and Cognition, MIT, July 2004

Chairs: Christian Freksa ( U Bremen), Georg Vrachliotis (ETH), Sven Bertel (U Bremen)
Commitee: Barbara Tversky (U Stanford), John Gero (U Sydney), Gabriela Goldschmidt (Technion)
Keynote Speaker: Bill Hillier (UCL London)

The intention of the workshop is to discuss and clarify hypotheses and insights about human conceptions of space and their influence on architectural design processes. Decision making in architectural design includes processes that employ external representations in a range of different spatial formats. As a matter of principle, these representations are not veridical with respect to the building as a whole but they show subsets of all features. In this respect, we can expect the mental representations of spaces that get constructed during architectural design to be aspectual. A good deal is known about human mental conceptions of large-scale spaces, i.e. spaces that can not be overlooked from a single location; there exist models that detail their properties and structure relating to developmental issues, to learning, or to a variety of spatial reasoning tasks. The increase of our knowledge is reflected in the use and disuse of metaphors such as cognitive maps, cognitive atlases, or cognitive collages. In architectural spaces, vista space plays a more dominant role than large-scale space.

Bill Hillier as the Keynote Speaker of the Workshop presents questions about spatial cognition from a syntactic point of view: space syntax as a scientific method and technique for describing and analyzing spatial layouts in buildings and cities focus on correlating configurational measures of space with aggregate behaviors. In his contribution Bill Hillier emphasizes three research areas in respect to architectural design: (1) the mathematical nature of space, (2) important spatial factors for experiencing spatial environments, and (3) movement flows in cities. Bringing together these areas, Hillier develops the following three suggestions: (1) people seem to form a syntactic configuration of space at the navigational level between the body and the universe; (2) linear relations seem to be critical in moving from seeing local parts to an approximation of global wholes; and (3) there seem to be a number of suggestive links between the formal properties of space and how we cognize it.

Stephen Hirtle presents a multimedia application for navigation within architectural spaces: to understand and describe architectural space adequately two different kinds of spatial information are required: (1) spatial information of the outside of buildings, including how they fit into larger neighborhood spaces, and (2) spatial information of the inside of buildings, including how humans interact with internal spaces. Hence Hirtle highlights the interplay between scale and modality with respect to these two kinds of spatial information. The common ground of these two levels of spatial information is the general use of visual, spatial and semantic languages. Hirtle illustrates this by presenting a multimedia navigation tool for locating buildings on a campus.

Penny Yates discusses and exemplifies the predicament of architectural space: The purpose of her contribution is to analyze the use of current computer modeling programs with respect to their deficits for architectural design. Referring to a well-known essay from theory of architectural design (Rowe & Koetter, 1977) Yates confrontationally discusses the idea of buildings as objects or as spaces. Exemplifying the relation between the form and the function of a circus tent Yates investigates two methods of planning and designing buildings, from inside to outside or from outside to inside. These spatial concepts – object vs. space and outside vs. inside - are examined with regard to conceptual possibilities of computer modeling programs.

-- GeorgVrachliotis - 10 May 2005