The Need for Domain Theories

Abstract

They show how space syntax analysis can be used in conjunction with observation and questionnaires to build a picture of an organisation operating in space and then to map the differences made by subsequent layout changes. The results also show that the application of the research findings in design is far from straightforward, because spatial changes are likely to interact with organisational culture, and this needs to be allowed for in design by a policy of spatial diversity. In her paper Bustard deals with a very different kind of problem: that of trying to throw light on the societies that created buildings in the archaeological record by the syntactic study of those buildings and the residual evidence they supply of their patterns of use. The study focuses on eleven segments of three of thegreat houses' of Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest, taking into account a sample of twenty of the small houses scattered over the local landscape dating from the same period. The analysis is used to comment on the various theories that have been put forward to account for thebig idea'behind the great houses and suggests that none is in itself consistent with the observed patterns, but that amixed model'could be. Suggestively, the small-house analysis indicates both functional specialisation of houses and cooperation in food processingöand by implication economic cooperationöacross houses, a pattern which might be investigated in further research. In his paper on museum layouts, Choi argues that the syntactic properties of museum and gallery plans affect the pattern of exploratory movement at least as powerfully as the distribution of displays. He further argues that the pattern of coawareness of visitors that arises as a byproduct of movement is subject to generic correlations to the syntactic properties of layouts, regardless of the specific nature of various exhibitions. By implication, Choi's research suggests that spatial layout plays a significant role with respect to a major programmatic function of museums and galleries, namely the presentation of visual displays within an intelligible spatial framework involving sequencing, controlled visual comparisons, and classificatory ordering. Layout also gives rise to an emerging function, namely the creation of a collective pattern of social copresence as the context for viewing the displays. In my paper I deal with a theoretical problem in space syntax analysis: that in treating spatial configurations as graphs it seems to sacrifice much of the geometrical detail that ought to be informative about how urban spaces work. I argue that, by using a geometric representation that reflects the locally linear nature of movementö the fewest lines mapöand then using the graph to measure the relation of each line to all others, space syntax in effect internalises a key spatial aspect of movement into the structure of the graph, thus allowing the graph to bring to light the properties of position in the overall network that are critical to movement flows. It also suggests that, although space syntax appears at one level to offer an alternative to geometry in the analysis of urban space, one of its effects is to bring to light a pervasive geometricity in the construction of urban space, reflecting the constructive ordering of local and global movement as the settlement grows. It is this, it is argued, that both gives the settlement its overall structure, and allows it to be captured, albeit in approximate form, through the intermediary of the line graph.