Thanks to Jake Desyllas for starting a discussion with an excellent
summary of what space syntax is about, and what any research community
should be.
I am in a similar position to Tom Dine and Luciano Borghesi -"lurking"
at the periphery, with limited knowledge gained through the "taxing" route
of books and articles. In addition to the profusion of special terms and
meanings, the very transciency that Desyllas correctly identifies as an
attribute of theories and techniques makes this a difficult endeavor -just
when I think I understand one concept and associated technique, it seems
to be replaced with new ones. This is what makes it hard for someone who
is not immersed in syntax research as fulltime pursuit. (I was a
practicing architect for 12 years and am now working on a Ph.D. in urban
geography.)
I am presently using the rudiments of a syntax approach to analyzing the
relationship between social organization and spatial form in northwestern
Mexico in the 18th and 19th centuries. RE Tom Dine's comment on the
limited effects of individual buildings, I would argue that individual
buildings can indeed have a strong local, and potentially, global,
influence based on the nature of the "public/private interface" -that is,
how the building configures socio-spatial relationships between
inhabitants and visitors. The proliferation of building types in the 17th
and 18th centuries in Europe (Markus 1993) and in the late 19th C on the
periphery of the world economy, is really about social and spatial
definition of categories of visitors as urban space became differentiated
through the division of labor and other attendant political economic
processes. How an individual building accomplishes this is how it
influences urban space. So I think architectural design should place much
more emphasis on this, and it is a place that syntax could be used in the
design process.
I'd like to suggest that the mailbase could be used to post abstracts of
new and recent syntax research on a regular basis - I found the recent
bibliography posted by Mark Major helpful - but abstracts would be even
more so.
Nina Veregge
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