You Are Here (18 page)

We seldom pay as much attention to how we perceive and use the spaces in a house as when we are preparing it for sale or when we are considering a purchase, yet the configuration of built spaces in our residences, offices, and the institutional buildings that we frequent always exerts a powerful influence on our behavior, how we move about, where we linger, and how we feel. Good designers understand some of these influences intuitively. The scientific facts of spatial cognition, the manner in which our brain is put together to perceive and act in space, and the spatial peccadilloes of the human mind can help to shed considerable light on these processes.

Some time ago, when I received a pleasant bundle of cash (in fact it was part of the advance that I was paid for writing this book), I treated myself to something that I had always wanted—an exquisitely comfortable leather reading chair. When the chair was delivered, I was immediately confronted with a difficult decision: where to put it? Some locations were ruled out on the basis of inadequate light or inconvenience. Others seemed to jut impractically into areas that I knew would be frequented by noisy, playing children. One location, buried in a small room, nestled against a sheltering
wall, seemed perfect. I placed the chair in the appointed spot, set up a small side table to hold a book and a glass of wine, and purchased a stylish reading lamp to place at my elbow. For the next six months, I used the chair three times, instead preferring to do all my reading in another, less comfortable chair situated in the middle of what was not only the largest room in our house but also the one that was most likely to be filled with children, toys, and, because this room was open to the kitchen, clanging pots and dishes. I’ve now moved my new chair to another location, near a window, facing into the big room, where it gets a bit more use but still not as much use as the old armchair in the middle of the large, open space.

What influences where we rest in our homes, where we place the furniture, and how we spend our time? To some extent, we are steered by simple pragmatics. Bathrooms must be used for taking baths and showers, kitchens must normally be used for preparing meals, and beds must, by definition, be placed in bedrooms. But much of our quiet, waking time is flexible and influenced by simple preference. How are such preferences formed? Can we make scientific predictions about where people might be drawn to walk and linger inside their homes?

Figures 6 and 7 show a part of the floor plan of my house, with the locations of the two chairs—the expensive but seldom-used new chair in the reading room and the heavily used old chair in the family room/kitchen. Theoretically, the smaller room is supposed to be a quiet room for reading, but in practice it often seems to fill with Lego blocks and children’s shoes. I don’t know why. Beside the smaller room, and opening into the family room, is a small hallway that leads to the side door.

Consider the walls of the rooms to be nothing more than barriers to visibility. These barriers set up two different kinds of contours. Closed contours are just the physical walls, usually the
exterior walls, beyond which we can neither move (without going out a door) or see (except through windows). Regardless of where I might be sitting in the space, the positions of the closed contours do not change. Open contours, on the other hand, are those that are set up by the positions of interior walls. So, for example, the partial walls that separate the family room from the reading room set up barriers to visibility that vary depending on where I sit or stand. For example, as I move about in the family room, the amount of space inside the reading room that is visible to me will change.

Figure 6
: Field of visibility from new chair

Figure 7
: Field of visibility from old chair

In each figure, I have shaded in gray all the parts of the house that I’m able to see from the vantage points of each chair. These regions of visibility from a particular vantage point are referred to as isovists.
²
As you can see from the examples, the isovist is formed by both the closed contours of the outer walls of the house and the open contours caused by limitations on visibility (the simple fact that, unlike Superman, I’m not able to see through walls). The very simple isovist analysis of my armchairs makes it easy to see a couple of salient features of my favorite seating position in my house. First, the location of the family-room armchair offers the largest available isovist in my entire house. I can see all of the family room and kitchen, a good part of the reading room, and some of the hallway. What I haven’t drawn in the diagrams is a row of large windows
showing views of the back yard, a large part of which I can also see from the family-room armchair. In contrast, the isovist that is available from the reading-room armchair consists only of the reading room itself and a thin wedge of space in the family room. Without doing any very sophisticated analyses of the size and shape of the isovist, it is pretty obvious that one reason for my preference for one chair over the other is probably the size of the isovist it offers. Another is that the location of the preferred chair is virtually the only position on the main floor of the house (other than in the hallway itself) from which it is easily possible to monitor the comings and goings of the side door, the most commonly used door in the house. From the standpoint of security, this is another reason why it makes sense for me to prefer to sit in the old chair rather than in the more comfortable chair in the reading room.

This simple analysis of a part of the interior space in my house has revealed some of the reasons for my own patterns of lingering and movement. It has long been known that one of the features that attracts us most strongly to interior spaces is a feeling of spaciousness, so it makes some sense that we gravitate to the largest isovists we can find. Experiments have shown that we are preternaturally skilled at finding these large isovists. When participants in research studies were put in architectural spaces and then asked to find the center of the environment or the position from which most could be seen (or, conversely, the best hiding place), they moved quickly and accurately to the correct location. We can parse space very effectively using views, vistas, and scenes. Given what we learned in the first part of this book, this is just what would be expected. Our understanding of the size and shape of spaces is based on what can be taken in at a glimpse, and it begins to falter when it must find ways to incorporate the unseen features lying behind open and closed contours.

In addition to simple size, isovists have many other properties. We can define isovists in terms of their jaggedness (isovists that have very long borders compared to their overall area are more jagged), complexity (isovists that have many corners are more complex), symmetry (the number of axes of symmetry that they contain), and in many other ways, limited only by the imagination of the researcher. Basic isovist properties such as these can then be combined to characterize more complex properties of a seen space, such as its apparent spaciousness, openness (a combination of jaggedness with some other isovist properties), complexity, and order (a combination of symmetry and some other properties indicative of redundancy).

Do these kinds of isovist properties influence our preferences for spaces? Does the comfortable little corner that you remember using as a perching spot at the family cottage or in your grandmother’s farmhouse hold such attraction to you because of the shape of the space that encloses your view? Some experiments suggest that this is a good possibility. When people were shown simulations of spaces with distinctive isovists on large screens, they were able to rank them in terms of their complexity, pleasantness, and interest, and many of their rankings showed impressive relationships with the measurements of the spatial isovists. We find spaces with high complexity and symmetry to be most pleasing, open and symmetrical spaces to be most beautiful, and open and complex spaces to be most interesting.
³

Given such findings, it isn’t at all surprising that we tend to spend more time in particular locations in our homes. Findings such as these may also go some way to explaining the success of fluffers in heightening the interest of potential house buyers. It isn’t very likely that such professionals would resort to the extreme of moving walls, but placing furniture in spots with favorable isovists
might help to draw visitors to the best locations within a space and then imagine themselves sitting in their own cozy armchairs with grand vistas, symmetrical and jagged isovists, complex and interesting spaces. We seem to have a deep, intuitive understanding of how isovists influence feeling, so it would not be surprising if a group of design professionals had managed to train themselves to heighten their sensitivities to such influences without having had any formal training in architectural theory or isovist analysis. Staging divas are probably good intuitive-cognitive scientists.

We are beginning to make some progress in understanding what kinds of spatial arrangements appeal to people in their homes, but it would be of great interest to know about the origins of such emotional attachments to particular places. Much thought on such questions has revolved around people’s attachments to natural places, something we will deal with more extensively in chapter 11, on greenspaces. But it is likely that the same kinds of mental processes that guide our preference for certain arrangements of nature also operate inside buildings.

Jay Appleton, a geographer by training, tried to draw a connection between our preference for particular types of visual scenes in nature and our evolutionary history. Was it possible that the basis of our aesthetic preference for certain types of views was biological? Do we prefer to look at certain shapes of space because our evolutionary forebears, naked apes struggling for survival on the African savannah, would have found survival benefits in placing themselves in positions in space from which such views were possible? The cornerstone of Appleton’s argument has come to be known as the duality of prospect and refuge.
⁴
We prefer to be in positions that give us some visual cover (refuge) but from which we can look out over large vistas of space (prospect).

Though the simple idea of prospect and refuge might not be able to account for all the findings related to preferences for isovist size, shape, and complexity, it might certainly account for some important elements of it. At a pragmatic level, it might be argued that my preference for the chair in the middle of a large room is related to my desire to keep tabs on my busy family and to know who has entered and left my house through the side door. But this doesn’t explain my pleasure and ease in that same chair when the house is empty or when all the children are long in their beds. Appleton’s suggestion is that the preference for long views from sheltered positions (in my case, the corner of a room) is perhaps written into our DNA from days when our overwhelming daily concern was the location of the closest saber-toothed tiger rather than the nearest Starbucks.

In her insightful book on the evolution of house design,
House Thinking
, Winnifred Gallagher suggests that some successful architects have a strong intuitive sense of the power of prospect and refuge.
⁵
Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, was fond of building alcoves with low ceilings, especially in cozy spots near the hearth. In terms of primitive survival, a sheltered spot near the fireplace must be considered as the archetypal refuge from which to look out on the grand prospects offered up by the rest of the house. Similarly, Christopher Alexander, in
A Pattern Language
, his encyclopaedic recipe book for successful city, town, neighborhood, and house planning, suggests varied ceiling heights as an important design principle, particularly in areas of quiet repose such as alcoves in bedrooms designed to contain beds.
⁶
In the same way that house stagers may have some intuition for what attracts buyers to a property, good designers and architects have strong sensibilities for how the aesthetics of space can contribute to successful and comfortable abodes. Theoreticians like Appleton lend a scientific rationale to principles that long experience has demonstrated to be effective.