WORKSHOP 8 MENTAL CONCEPTIONS OF EMERGENT SPACES IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Chairs

Configurations are simultaneously existing relations. How we understand them is a problem common to cognitive science and architecture. Space syntax, which is a set of techniques for the analysis of spatial configuration, has over the years produced a body of findings correlating the formal properties of configurations to observed human behaviour. Although most or these correlations are with behaviour at the aggregate level, and so at one remove from cognition at the individual level, the results do raises the question as to how far a human ability to read formal aspects of configuration may have acted as an intervening variable between environment and behaviour. To the extent that it has, it would suggest some kind of generic formal dimension to the human ability to cognise spatial configurations. In this paper, three kinds of evidence are presented showing different aspects of the relation between the formal properties of spatial configurations and human behaviour. The first is about how we deal with simultaneous relations in our immediate ambient field, and suggests we have a basic capacity to read the complexes of relations that are created by everyday behaviour in a configurational way. The second suggests that in more complex configurations, linear or near linear relations seem to play a central role in building a picture of configurations which cannot be experienced simultaneously. In the third we show how linear or near-linear elements in geometric and topological relations seem to form the basis of how we navigate in urban space. Finally we draw all three together and ask: is there a generic formal dimension to how we cognise spatial configurations, and is this the common ground between the way we create spatial configurations in the real world through design and the way we understand them.