A STUDY OF VARIATIONS AMONG MIES’S COURTYARD HOUSES BY A COMBINED SET OF VISUAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROPERTIES

Descriptions of space are invariably concerned with their geometrical properties, such as proportions, volumetric relationships, topological structures etc. However, description of space cannot be separated from the perception of space and hence the concern among space syntax researchers to introduce perceptual descriptors of space such as isovist to their list of topological descriptors. Visual descriptors of space such as isovist, as this paper argues, do not exhaust the perceptual qualities of space. Space is perceived in a context which is a combination of its visual and environmental properties. Moreover, perception is not only spatial but also temporal. That the perception of space is inadvertently tied to both geometry and its environment has never been challenged as a theoretical argument by design scholars and practitioners alike. Still, analytic studies in design have continuously separated the two, where environmental studies are foregrounded upon understanding behavioural aspects in the context of technological requirements of the design, and geometric interpretations are tied to perceptual identifiers of spaces and forms. This paper investigates how visual and environmental properties of space can be juxtaposed over a dynamic time- scale in order to develop a rich perceptual description of space through the analysis of experimental court houses designed by Mies and his students in the 1930’s