Building Layouts as Cognitive Data: Purview and Purview Interface

This paper offers a computational description and provisional statistical profile of properties of building layouts that contribute to making them intelligible. Buildings are arrangements of boundaries that demarcate interior space according to the organization of human life and activity. At the same time a building is usually a continuously connected interior. Thus, the implicit question addressed in practice by the design of every building layout is as follows: how can spatial demarcation and differentiation be consistent with our capacity to cognitively map a building as a whole? Everyday experience suggests that spaces with characteristic names such as corridors, courtyards, atria, halls and hallways act as references. They provide us with a more expansive visual field than the rooms devoted to particular uses; more importantly, they often afford an overview of the connections to adjoining spaces. This is generalized by the idea of the purview interface: the interface between ordinary spaces confining perception to a limited part of the interior, and prominent spaces providing overview not only of area but also of 11 Building layouts as CognitiVe data connections. The purview interface can function as a rudimentary foundation of layout intelligibility. I show that prominent overview spaces are strategically distributed so that all other spaces are only very few visual turns away from the nearest overview space. The strategic distribution of overview spaces limits the minimum number of turns around corners that are necessary in order to move between any two spaces in the building. This affords anchoring cognitive maps on overview spaces which can act as effective references when navigating between any two spaces.