Tom,

Don't talk yourself down as a practitioner (last para) - to my mind
syntax is all about practice. My response to Adipat was trying to be
very brief and to sketch an answer to his two questions. In fact I think
his first is the more interesting, but please don't let the things I
didn't mention imply that I don't think them important:

> 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.

Where do I say anything else? The point is so well known to those on
this list that I didn't bother to say it.

Now on your main point:

> 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."

The real thing I am perhaps taking issue with is the commonly held view
of the linearity of the design process - that they move from the
'abstract brief' to the concrete design. In my experience this is seldom
the case.

For me what syntax does is allow us to look at the concrete examples,
understand them and generate theories that can be brought to bear in
design. The virtual community is one such as you point out, but there
are many others in the literature.  How are they brought to bear? I
suspect that there are many ways that this could be done, possibly even
including the kind of 'automated design' that you seem to imply would be
desirable (I am not so sure that this is desirable). The ways I am most
familiar with involve dialogue between the clients, users and designers
with syntax 'experts' around the same table. The way this dialogue tends
to operate in my experience is highly iterative - designers use
precedent, or any number of triggers to generate formal design
propositions. Users and clients and syntax people use their knowledge
and theories to crit these designs (that really involves imagining what
they would be like 'in real life'. Syntax analysis plays a useful role
in this 'imagining' as well as in making sense of past experience - we
often analyse precedent cases that the client 'likes' or wants to avoid,
so that we can better pin down just what it is that she wants to avoid
and whether or not a design proposition is likely to achieve that. In my
experience going from the concrete to the abstract, and from the
abstract to the concrete, happens iteratively all the way through design
projects.

Alan Penn
Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
+44 (0)20 7679 5919
[log in to unmask]
www.vr.ucl.ac.uk
www.spacesyntax.org


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On
> Behalf Of tom lists
> Sent: 16 July 2004 00:41
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Configurational Analysis: application to 'real world'
> performance analysis
>
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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