Brasilia, Brazil, 29 March - 3 April 1999
Making Isovists Syntactic: Isovist integration
analysis
Alasdair Turner and Alan Penn
Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
(Torrington Place Site)
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
England
tel (44) (0)171 391 1782
fax (44) (0)171 916 1887
email a.turner@ucl.ac.uk
www http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/
Isovists and isovist fields are of interest to space syntax in that they
offer a way of addressing the relationship between the viewer and their
immediate spatial environment, however, in the form Benedict describes
in his 1979 paper they are essentially non-syntactic. All the measures
he proposes and then plots as fields are locally defined, and are independent
of the state of the field in other locations. This paper presents a method
for integrating isovists, based on the connectivities of a set of isovists
represented as a graph, and allows global relational measures to be developed
which are attributable to each viewer location, but which are essentially
relational and so syntactic in their definition.
We make a comparison of axial line and convex space integration analysis
with the isovist integration analysis using case studies of both building
and urban morphologies. We show that isovist integration displays an excellent
correlation with observed people movement, including a more detailed illustration
of space usage than conventional space syntax analysis. We also demonstrate
that isovist integration can be used to provide an explanation for some
observed phenomena which are hard to account for using conventional analysis.
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