Perspectivas o ideas de participación

An attempt to summarise the generative theoretical process of the space syntax analytical method lies beyond the scope of this study. Nor would a detailed description of its techniques represent any contribution to a subject which has been extensively exposed in The Social Logic of Space ^ and in a vast number of publications by the creators and collaborators of this methodology, not to mention Steadman’s crystal clear explanation of its essence, in the work referred above®. However, a few words on some arguments posed by its critics might help to consolidate the appropriateness of the application of space syntax techniques for tackling the problems in this research.

R. Lawrence,* has identified and described seven recurrent interpretations of vernacular architecture — aesthetic/formalist, typological, evolutionary , social and geographical diffusionism , physical and cultural — in a survey of studies published in English or French. The author includes space syntax in the ‘typological’ category and criticises this type of approach on grounds th a t... those studies which only measure and record the design, construction and furnishing of specific dwellings, ... are not informative about the meaning of these dwellings, why they were built, the lifestyle of the inhabitants and possible changes to these and other variables during the course of time ...

Lawrence’s and similar surveys although valuable for helping researchers to trace up references in economical way, tend to group authors into generalised

Hillier & Hanson, 1984, op.cit. (passim). Steadman, op.cit. 1983, pp.215-239.

Lawrence, Roderick J.. Learning from colonial houses and lifestyles in Turan (ed.). Vernacular Architecture. Avebury. 1990, pp.219-257.

categories that can be quite inappropriate. The inclusion of, for instance, Glassie s Folk Housing in Middle Virginia^ in such a short-reaching

perspective comes as a surprise, to say the least, since the meaning of those houses and why they were built in one or another way to meet the changing lifestyles of inhabitants was precisely what G lassie arrived at, by interpreting his exhaustive measurements.

Elsewhere Lawrence® has criticised Hillier&Hanson’s approach more directly as deterministic, arguing th a t... the mere act of transforming the two-

dimensional representation of a building from a traditional scale drawing to a graph does not yield any information about psychological, societal, cultural, or temporal issues and that ...to limit the analysis of domestic architecture to a study of its configuration would be quite misleading, because the meaning and use of domestic space is not solely dependent on its form.

The shallowness of perspective attributed to space syntax in the above criticism suggests that the author has hardly realised the extent to which its techniques can be expanded to accommodate all sorts of variables as has often been done. This impression is strengthened by the elementary questions Lawrence poses as objections to the approach: What if internal changes and additions were subsequently made to these houses? How are the different rooms classified and used? The answers seem so

commonsensical that one wonders why they were asked in the first place. It is obvious that any of the analytical procedures can and must be reworked to account for changes whenever additions, conversions or simply a new access perspective is being investigated. This flexibility for continuous (and fairly economical) reworking is, in fact, one of the blatant excellences of the method. Another is the possibility open for classifying spaces according to use or to a virtually unlimited range of variables. This crucial aspect often seems to be missed altogether by many critic viewers. By enabling the labelling of functions to be inserted into the analytical procedures, space syntax allows

semantics and structure to be unified in the same framework, counteracting the idea that a ‘semantic structure' is not present in architecture. Space syntax shows it not only to be there but offers the means to retrieve it in a very straightforward way.

^^Glassle, H.op.cit.

In his Introduction to a series of archaeological studies on domestic space Ross Sanson ®, has most typological approaches (space syntax as well as Glassie s artefactual grammar) lined along with ... the formalist interpretation as the methodological foundation for describing and measuring buildings. ... , . He criticises empirical measurement for being subjective although stating that ...the only true social theory that could come out of architectural studies would necessarily be closely related to the most important characteristic the built environment possesses: its capacity to order space and organise human contact... and that such ... a theory could only be developed from a method of describing and measuring the space of buildings .

He also concedes that by ... eschewing formal analysis ... much detail is surely lo st..., but points out some difficulties inherent to spatial analysis as, for instance, that of identifying ... a room or closed space within a building ... (bearing open-plan layouts in mind) and that of compartmentalising outdoor spaces. He accuses Hillier & Hanson’s approach of not being specific about...

what is meant by control of access ... and expresses surprise that this

approach takes ... its cue from work done on twentieth-century society, which does not think in terms of power over the household, ... (but for parental control of children’s movement). Presumed flaws on the notion of control are sought to be illustrated by his arguing that although in Scottish tower-houses the development is one of increasing control and exploitation, the adoption of more stairways would deem the spatial configuration less restricted, less controlled.

The insertion of space syntax into the framework of formalist interpretations although strongly arguable is beyond the purposes of this discussion and shall not be dealt with. The same applies to the allegation of its being subjective. The first two objections, on the other hand, can be promptly dismissed. Space syntax offers several alternatives for sorting out indoor and outdoor spaces, walled or otherwise, all seeming to work equally well provided that they are consistently applied. This is being done all the time as shall be seen in the next chapters. As for the issue of control it looks as if some concepts (i.e. that of class control) are so deeply rooted into academic thought that impedes the acknowledgement of the simple fact that a wall, a closed door or even a mobile

element can, and usually is, a means of control not only by parents over children but indeed by anybody trying to prevent others from taking part in whatever goes on beyond it. As for the inclusion of backstairs in tower- houses, this could only be translated as necessarily configuring a less

controlling pattern by a naive space syntax user, specially after functions have been added and the routes defined by such thoroughfares identified. Any fairly experienced space syntax researcher would be well aware that transition spaces ... draw rooms at a distance closer but only by disengaging those near at hand. They, therefore, facilitate purposeful or necessary communication reducing, at the same time, all incidental communication , as Evans® has observed, a fact that might certainly have suited the need for increasing

control in Sanson’s Scottish houses.

Frank Brown®" argues that whereas in other morphological approaches the information lost in the process of representation is the price paid for the

necessary simplification and can be ransomed at a later stage, in space syntax ... this stripping away of information is more than a matter of convenience: it is seen as the necessary and privileged route to social relations ... He argues that the interacting of shape, size and topology is overlooked by the focus on

topological properties and warns against the dangers of treating ... the

relationship between social structure and spatial structure as intrinsically law­ like. Brown also claims th a t... the access pattern is interpreted as the

underlying generative mechanism of building form (hence the term

‘genotype’) ... a fact that gives the graph unique explanatory status and leads to a direct equation between relational structure and social structure.

It should be stressed, once more, that space syntax does not impede other information being brought into the analysis. Nor does it forbid other theoretical approaches — i.e. historical — to interact, complement or verify its results. In recent times, numerical and graphical syntactic results have been plotted against a huge range of other parameters which include not only historical and economical ones but physical data such as dimensions, average temperature, lighting, etc. as well as subjective ones like the occupiers’ assessments on

Evans, R.Figures,Doors and Passages in Architectural Design. April 1978, pp.267-277 Brown, F. Comment on Chapman: some cautionary notes on the application of spatial measures to prehistoric settlements in Sanson (ed). The social archaeloov of houses. Edinburgh University Press, 1990, p.95.

spatial and comfort issues in buildings. Total flexibility is allowed the researcher who decides what alternative perspective may strengthen his search, which variables to include and to what extent these should be

explored. It remains arguable whether overloading a study with a plethora of approaches and a massive range of variables makes it much better. It might not.

Brown himself seems to have got some satisfactory results in his analysis of semi-detached houses by sticking purely to rectangular arrangements and historical data. He has also taken the pains of verifying, in his handling of the

star pattern’ in a narrow-frontage house, how builders can devise clever strategies to counteract the limits of geometry and still achieve the set of desired spatial relations, a fact that suggests that shape and dimensions may not be as restrictive as some have claimed.

As for the dangers of reifying access relations into social relations there are some points which must be argued. It is not true that the access pattern in space syntax is posed as ... the underlying generative mechanism of building form. Spatio-temporal reality is, in fact, the generative mechanism of the built form which the access pattern translates. This has been sufficiently clarified in

Hillier&Hanson concept termed as inverted genotype^. Reality generates the structure which translates the ideas in the minds of men into a construct that enables (or hinders) human activity. The rules that shapen that construct are what can be recaptured by certain analytical procedures. This helps to reveal aspects obscured by conventional analysis as well as by most morphological approaches that deal mainly with the ordering of geometrical entities since this ordering of spaces may be very restrictive or very loose in reality without

necessarily affecting the degree in which the complex is structured for social purposes.

The dangers of syntactic misinterpretation are no greater than the various traps awaiting researchers on their quest for knowledge, whatever their chosen

In organisms the genotype is realised in each individual through a description centre which is the embodiment of genetic instructions. There is no such description centre in society.

For this Millier & Hanson substitutes a local description retrieval mechanism which allows the retrieval of a description from reality. The structured information on which the system runs is not carried in the description mechanism but in reality itself... Therefore, a discrete system runs on an inverted genotype, which exists as... informational structure within an environment of human spatio-temporal reality. Millier & Hanson, 1984 op.cit.pp.43-45.

analytical framework and techniques. One can only try to avoid them by

careful handling of the data — provided it is trustworthy — and by continuously checking it against the available body of references. This seems to be the only path for sorting out problems that will inevitably be met on the journey. The path might be tougher, as Brown® points out when only very meagre

information on the object can help to ... fill lacunae, test hypotheses and check conclusions. Fortunately here, this is not always the case.

Less inspiring is Johnson’s®" criticism. He starts by bunching Millier & Hanson together with Rapoport on grounds of cross-cultural approaches, formal

compatibility and shared assumptions on the ... strong relationship between the spatial form and the ways in which encounters are generated and

controlled... He later expresses his difficulty in seeing ... how architectural change can be explained within this framework... adding, in a most cryptic fashion, that this explanation would hold no problem ... if architecture simply changed with predetermining social change, but as Hillier & Hanson

themselves point out, " through its ordering of space the man-made physical world is already a social behaviour".

One can not help debating the authors’ reasons for relating the two methods as if a cross-cultural perspective and the notions behind the stated proposition were the preserve of a few authors alone. Moreover, although Hillier and Hanson resort to cross-cultural comparisons for presenting diverse ways in which societies are realised through spatial structuring, space syntax offers a range of analytical tools powerful enough to reveal important social aspects of the built environment regardless of these being universal or culturally-specific and whether the object is approached through a synchronic or a diachronic perspectives. By considering both methods as formally compatible, Johnson also overlooks the crucial difference between an approach that departs from abstract notions and proceeds to identify their unfolding in the material world and another which has been laboriously retrieved from the very structures that constitute the material preconditions for the spatio-temporal realisation of society. However strongly its author stresses that the built environment affects,

“ Brown in Sanson. 1990, op.cit.p.93.

Johnson, Matthew. Housing Culture: Traditional architecture in an English landscape, UCL Press, London, 1993, pp.29-30.

guides and constrains behaviour,Rapoport’s analytical framework does not appear to escape the subject-object polarity concerning the approach of the built environment, which Hillier and Hanson have toiled to overcome. One of the objections to space syntax posed by Johnson, seems beyond refutation. Does he mean that by being also a social behaviour the built form cannot express change in social behaviour? Can the built form not express itself then? One wonders.

It is not believed that reviewing a lot more criticism on space syntax would add much in support of this analytical framework, even because the task could end up by filling volumes. This fact is already a good measure of its importance. The reasons for having chosen space syntax as both toolbox and theoretical foundation for the present study could, however, be summarised in the strong conviction that it actually offers the means to retrieve socio-cultural information from buildings regardless of their shape, size, complexity or stylistic affinities, without the need to resort to borrowed analogies or sophisticated mathematical calculations and without having to exhaust all feasible spatial possibilities, a deed, it seems, not achieved by many methodological approaches.

Ross Sanson® states that the ... theories producing the best social

archaeologies of houses seem to come from outside architectural studies . So do the great majority of those producing any sort of domestic architectural studies themselves, whether good or otherwise. Most have, regrettably sat among the othenA/ise.

In the preface to The Social Logic of Space Hillier and Hanson^ state that their aim was ...to reverse the assumption that knowledge must first be

created in the academic disciplines before being used in the applied ones, by using architecture as a basis for building a new theory — and a new approach to theory — of the society-space relation. It is trusted that although not having to look for his clues within the limits of his own discipline the architect researcher should be allowed to. Space syntax is, of course, one among many alternatives. It is as good as any, better than most and unlike the majority, it is architect-friendly. This is already a good reason for choosing it.

Rapoport, Amos. Systems of activity and systems of settings, in Kent (ed. ), op.cit.p. 11. Sanson, Ross, op.clt.p.6.

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