Form and Space Diversity in Human Habitats: Perceptual Responses

Form and Space Diversity in Human Habitats: Perceptual Responses

Pyron, Bernard

Environment and Behavior , 3, 4, 382-411, Dec 71

"To test perceptual responses, 120 subjects viewed 12 experimental and one controlled housing environments. Three levels of building form diversity were combined with four levels of space diversity in the experimental environments. Results indicated that amount of visual coverage of the field of view increased significantly with increases in both form and space diversity."

Simplicity of form and space structuring was the goal of much of twentieth century architecture. Mies van der Rohe claimed that "less is more" in buildings. The International Style in architecture did not create interesting form and space designs, since its hospitals, college buildings, civic centers, airport terminals, and large apartment buildings all look alike.

But Frank Lloyd Wright made war upon the box as architecture, and on the simplicity of space structuring of the International Style for sixty years or more. Wright broke out of the box in steps. Over a period of years he developed ways of making interior space in his big Prairie houses flow in and around jogs in walls, into other spaces,and he varied the ceiling heights to structure space vertically. With its horizontal lines and hip roof, the Malcolm Wiley house (1934) of Minneapolis reminds us of the horizontal look of the Prairie houses.
In his rectilinear 90 degree angle designs, Wright broke up the monotony of the four walls and ceiling which create the space of a room as a box. He jogged walls to avoid the monotony of long straight lines, created partial partitions within spaces, and created partial ceilings so that he broke out of box space in the vertical dimension. His lighting decks, many times decorated with greenery and Sung dynasty vases or contemporary pottery, broke space in the vertical and allowed it to flow above the deck. A whole wall was sometimes replaced by tall french-window doors. He put rows of windows up under the ceilings and eaves to replace the single windows that broke the continuity of a wall. "Rooms" were opened to the next "room" by elimination of doors. Wright made space flow in and out and up and down. He created interior space that was ever changing as one moved through it. The sculptured external form of his buildings are expressions of his interior space.
The box room is created by four 90 degree angles. So, to brake out of the box even more, Wright developed his diamond module system of design so that the 90 degree angle corners become 120 angle corners. The hexagon is a six sided geometrical form with each side having 120 degree internal angles. And a octagon is an eight sided form with 135 degree internal angles. Wright experimented with the hexagon system of design and briefly with something like the octagon, before finally developing his diamond module floor plan, where all angles are 120 and 60 degrees. This diamond module floor plan system was used by Wright to create more complex space structuring inside the houses, and more varied and diverse house exterior forms.
Wright did one project for a small suburban "town," for which he designed the streets, homes and some larger buildings. He first presented this plan in his book The Disappearing City in 1932 and by 1935 he and his apprentices built a very detailed twelve by twelve foot scale model of Broadacre City. But this project was never built.
In the study I did with three research assistants in the spring and summer of 1970 I focused on the city block level of design. All the city blocks we created as scale models were rectangles with eight houses on each block. The Control Condition was a design in which all eight houses were simple box shapes and spaced equally part on the block. Half of the designs featured these simple box houses, and another half of the designs had more complex floor plans and exterior house forms, like "L," "T," "cross," etc plans. One space condition was the Non-Grouping plan, but with houses spaced apart at different distances. There was a Grouping Non-Court condition, and Simple Court and Complex Court conditions. Four houses were grouped together with an interior space to form two courts for the Simple Court Condition and for the Complex Court condition all eight houses were grouped together to form larger and more complex outdoor spaces inside the court designs.
And independent of the Grouping, Non-Grouping, Simple Court and Complex Court conditions, there were the complex house floor plans for half the conditions and the simple box plans for the other half. This experimental design formed a 3 x 4 matrix. A repeated measures analysis of variance statistical test was done using this 3 x 4 experimental design. All participants saw the control condition and one of the experimental conditions of the form and space designs.
One hypothesis was that the amount of foveal visual coverage of the visual field while viewing films moving through the scale models would be greater for the more complex form and space conditions. Another hypothesis was that form and space complexity would be additive in determining amount of looking around at the images. We measured amount of coverage of the visual field by a camera photographing the eyes of the participants and recording their eye movements.
The hypothesis that the participants would look around more at the more complex environments than at the more simple ones was confirmed by the data. And form and space information, or amount of complexity were additive as expected, for determining how much the participants looked around at the environments shown them by the 16mm black and white films. Amount of visual coverage of the field of view can be taken as a measure of the orienting response to information in the environment. The more the amount of information, the more the people looked around to see the environment. An orienting response can be an indicator of interest in what the person is looking at.
Remember this study was done in 1970. At that time there were several studies in the literature showing that people prefer more complex visual designs to simple designs. In our 1970 study we also asked the participants to rate the control and experimental conditions shown them in the films on a 9 point scale for how much they liked or disliked the environments. The overall mean evaluation score for the control condition was 3.94 and for all experimental conditions - more complexity or more information in the environment - the evaluation average was 5.60. Form complexity as a variable of complexity was more important in the evaluation by the participants than was space complexity. That is, the participants judged complex forms to be liked more than simple forms, but the difference in their evaluations of simple space designs versus complex space designs was not statistically significant.
One of the Madison, Wisconsin newspapers did a story on this study, but I do not have it available now. I did find on the Internet a similar article on my study in the Milwaukee Sentinel for October 17, 1970
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1368&dat=19701017&id=ZahRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=VREEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5128%2C3708299
The Milwaukee Sentinel - Oct 17, 1970
The Milwaukee Sentinel article included this statement: "When people live in an open environment, their stress levels may be lower than when they are preoccupied with various worries, fears, hopes, anxieties," he said."

I have doubts I said that "When people live in an open environment, their stress levels may be lower than when they are preoccupied with various worries, fears, hopes, anxieties..." My idea was that diversity of form and space design might lower the s tress levels of people living in such environments. An "open environment" does not necessarily mean a diverse one which can be more interesting. An urban environment in which all the houses look much the same and each is a simple box with box rooms could be more depressing than an environment in which the houses are different and each house has a more complex design with a more complex series of interior space.

  I got some of the ideas for this study of the urban environment at the city block scale from the old man who had lived forty miles to the west of Madison, Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright did one suburban "town" design he called Broadacre City o f 1935, which was a suburban landscape with trees and a few buildings larger than homes, with fantastic looking cars on the streets. But instead of the small city lot of 60 by 120 feet in Wright's design every family would have an acre of land.

  In the Arboretum of Madison, Wisconsin there is a small unusual subdivision embedded in the thick forest, with some architect designed houses, sometimes called the "Lost City." It is not laid out in a rectilinear street pattern and is unusual because v ery little of the forest was cut down. The real Lost City is south of this subdivision, where only streets and utility structures were abandoned years ago and the forest grew over them. In the other "Lost City," which actually exists, only very small areas of the forest were cut down to put the houses on. The result is that the area looks much like a thick forest and the scattered houses are hard to photograph for that reason. To a small extent, this "Lost City" fulfills Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of a suburban "town" in which individual homes are well designed, and interesting, and notsetinamonotonousgridsystem with all streets atrightanglestooneanother. There is a Herb Fritz house in there and maybe another by him. Fritz was a Madison architect who was a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice. The Herb Fritz house is on Marshall Parkway, one of the main streets of the small subdivision embedded in the forest of the Arboretum. The photo below is of the Fritz house on Marshall Parkway.

Balden Street, east of Marshall Parkway, is the other main street of the small subdivision embedded in the forest, and Covall is a short street running roughly east and west between them. But there is no hint of a street grid design and the streets meander around.

In the early seventies I got into the "Lost City" area from Fish
Hatchery Road. There is a long rectangular conventional subdivision
that is cut out of the Arboretum off Fish Hatchery Road.
What is really lost is the beginnings of an infrastructure of parts of
streets and utilities that has been overgrown by the forest. This is southwest
off the end of that conventional subdivision. The real Lost City is off the end of Martin Street,which is the south border of the conventional subdivision, to the southwest. The unconventional small suburb embedded in the forest sometimes also called the "Lost City" is northwest off Carver Street which is the north border of the conventional long rectilinear subdivision off Fish Hatchery Road.