Legibility of Building Facades and Imageability of Historical City Center, Case Study: Bukittinggi City Center

Abstract

Urban design focuses more on organizing and structuring urban reality rather than the detailed design of the private domain. In this context, urban space legibility and imageability are the very important aspects in urban design. In fact, it is common for the development not to reflect the original characteristics of a region, so that the historical impression of the region fades. This study is aimed to describe the characteristics of "facades legibility" and "area imageability" along Minangkabau street as part of the historical city center of Bukittinggi. By structuring and organizing building facade elements, multi-themes of building facade legibilty and region imageability could be extracted, they are development process image and development product image. Development process image presents the development urban space in colonial, post colonial, dan recent periods. Development product image presents a fundamental character change, from homogeneous-horizontal image to the dominant heterogeneous vertical impression. Horizontality reflects the existence of a communal or collective development. Heterogeneous verticality shows an individual or partial development, that presents conservative, moderate, and radical facade transformations of individual building. Therefore public process approach of designing cities based on the concept of urban heterogeneous self-image become the most important element in urban design management.