Investigating the significance of wholeness in Prairie style planning using space syntax

Early twentieth century, American Prairie style architecture has been repeatedly praised for developing a number of innovative features in house design that were later influential in the formation of the modern movement. Some of these design innovations allegedly include significant contributions to the spatial configurational properties of housing. One of most celebrated of these properties is 'wholeness', being the degree to which the space of the plan is more united and integrated. However, the evidence for this claim is largely qualitative and is difficult to objectively assess. Therefore, in this paper, a detailed quantitative case study analysis is undertaken to compare the spatial wholeness of a group of Pre-Prairie style ('Victorian') and Prairie houses to critically examine whether the change was as significant as design historians suggest. For this purpose, Space Syntax techniques are used to measure and compare the properties of thirteen Victorian house plans and twenty-three Prairie style works