Dear Adipat
I share your puzzlement about the use of space syntax
in the real world, as some people on this list will
know. I have spent years trying to get an
understanding, and I keep hearing what it can do, but
not what it means. I have come to a few conclusions
of my own however, which have no academic standing,
but I offer them as opinions anyway.
* How can space syntax indicate the 'good' and 'bad'
performance of a building? *
I would suggest that it can show the extent to which
routes attract 'busyness' by being integrated into the
building, and to what extent places encourage people
to inhabit them by being distinct and coherent. It
may not show this in practice, but it lies within the
concepts.
* Looking at the functionality of the building * -
Space syntax holds the potential to show the way
building can work as a framework to support human
activity in groups of varying degrees of openness,
structuring their relationships and their encounter
with outsiders.
Surely the information needs to be about the
relationship between people, their activities and the
environment.
That is exactly what space syntax investigates, in my
humble opinion, which does not seem to be shared by
proper space-syntax researchers such as Alan.
I contend that it measures the pattern of potential
for co-visibility, not the shape of buildings. This
is contentious because the measure of straight-line s
may reflect a non-visual understanding of space and
movement, but straight lines are sight-lines so it is
convenient to discuss their pattern as one of
co-visibility between people who may be at any two
given locations, although it must at the same time be
a pattern of co-accessibility between them.
Nevertheless, the pattern of boundaries to space is
not the same as the pattern of co-visibility in those
spaces. You can derive an axial map from a survey
map, but you cannot reconstruct a unique pattern of
buildings from an axial map. This is because physical
boundaries are a controlling factor in co-visibility,
but the pattern of co-visibility is a geometrical
abstraction quite different from the pattern of
building; in fact it cannot be defined from the shape
of particular buildings until the entire global
pattern is taken into account.
To say that space syntax measures the geometry of
buildings is like saying that fluid dynamics measures
the geometry of a stream bed. It doesn't, it measures
a dynamic property of the water that fills the stream
bed, and can only do so in a probabilistic way. The
geometry of the streambed is just an indication from
which some characteristics of a stream can be
inferred; map geometry is an indication from which
co-visibility can be inferred, which in turn gives a
limited prediction of human activity.
* Second Order Variables *
As you rightly say, human activity is the point of all
building analysis. Alan gives higher order levels of
measurement, but perhaps not higher up the ladder of
causation linking buildings and human activity. I
always suspect that measures which cannot be named
have yet to find a human meaning.
I think the most noticeable 'higher order' idea in
space syntax is Bill Hillier's idea of 'virtual
community' induced by 'natural movement'. Alan hinted
at this idea, which says that busy public places are
safer than isolated ones because people have the
potential to act for each other's security, and that
the configuration of paths can, in itself, affect how
busy each path is. Space syntax is good at analyzing
patterns of human movement.
I have been unable to find the same level of abstract
analysis of the activity of static groups, but on the
face of it we could suggest that groups only work well
where members can see and meet each other easily. Or
more precisely, where members can interact more easily
with each other than with outsiders. It is perhaps a
question of who controls the interaction, and in this
I am defining a 'group' as a set of people who share
the same potential for interaction. We might call
this a 'virtual group.' The set of spaces that
defines the group is what I would call a functional
'Place,' although it seems to be much the same as the
'centres' which Bill Hillier has researched - perhaps
a 'centre' is the district which has the highest
interaction potential in a system of spaces.
* How does it ACTUALLY help you? *
To go back to your initial question, how does it
ACTUALLY help you look at the way a building is used?
MY answer would be that the ideas behind Space Syntax
should allow us to translate the brief into a series
of static activities (for one or more people), each of
which needs a 'place;' and a series of movements
between places each of which needs a 'route.'
It should be possible to specify the degree of
interaction needed between people within each set of
spaces, and the degree of interaction between this
'group' and those outside it. We could expect these
groups to operate at different scales, one within the
other. The room, the building, the campus and the
district may all be 'places' in the functional social
sense, with increasingly tenuous definition of 'group'
and decreasing levels of interaction as the scale
increases.
The unique opportunity offered by space syntax is the
potential to define the physical prerequisites for
such patterns of interaction in a sufficiently
abstract language; that of co-visibility.
Unfortunately, I have never seen a methodology for
moving from the abstract to the concrete, for
suggesting default layouts for spaces exemplifying a
pre-set pattern of co-visibility. Space Syntax
always works the other way, taking a concrete proposal
and showing what is wrong with it, as Alan says
"helping to translate the concrete into the abstract."
It seems to me that this is a bit late in "the
designer / client dialogue."
You may be able to see from the above that I have
found this quite frustrating in my own attempts to use
the fascinating concepts of space syntax in my day to
day work of designing buildings. I tried to clarify
how space syntax might bring a more precise
understanding to architectural concepts in a paper I
presented to the 4th Space Syntax Symposium last year,
available on the web at
http://www.spacesyntax.net/SSS4.htm. However, this is
rather dry and a bit confusing where a publishing
error crept in. I made a more user-friendly
PowerPoint presentation which I could email if you
were interested.
I should point out that I am an ordinary architect
without much formal training in Space Syntax, and have
picked up what I can from reading (fantastic wealth of
stuff on the web at www.spacesyntax.com). Whenever I
post on this list I hope to be put right by those how
know more. If this happens, you should take their
expertise more seriously than my thoughts.
Regards, Tom Dine
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