The Visual Functioning of Buildings: Outline of a possible general theory

Buildings engage us visually in ways that seem to be deliberately designed. This is particularly true of architecturally significant examples, of course, but is broadly true of all buildings. We outline a methodological approach, synthesized through a series of independent studies of visual form of buildings over the past two years, that is aimed at understanding how buildings seek and maintain visual attention. The primary motivation in developing this line of inquiry is morphological, driven by the premise that buildings are shaped as much from this demand of visual functioning in buildings, as from demands of generic function. A theory of visual functioning of buildings is therefore an integral aspect of the morphology of buildings. We propose that visual engagement with buildings can be understood at two levels. The pre-conditions for visual engagement are set by our general perceptual tendencies according to which we parse the world in a rule-bound, constructive, manner, using selective cues to organize the flux of received visual information into configurations of stable entities. Riding on top of this mechanism for visual perception is our capacity for imaginative viewing, whose functioning is still not well understood. We argue that architects create visual interest in buildings (and if successful, an imaginative engagement) by systematically suppressing or enhancing cues which we use in order to parse the world and draw upon four case-studies in order to illustrate a few critical points of our argument. The first study looks at how Le Corbusier systematically controlled types of shadows, and modeled the interiors of his villas of 1920s to enhance our early vision mechanism of detecting contours, in order to create the characteristic layered space of modernist free-plan. The second one shows how Herzog and De Meuron, in their De Young museum in San Fransico, deliberately counteract various cues that we normally use to judge depth in scenes, thwarting our attempt to organize the space of the museum in a representational form. A third study, of El Mastil, an historically significant Art Deco apartment building in Montevideo, Uruguay, illustrates how the systematic variation of cues directly explains stylistic moves and so may be a critical feature of the definition of styles. And a final study, of Louis Kahn's Salk Institute at La Jolla, attempts to show how the visual form created by systematic manipulation of cues is invariably tied up with the distribution of viewing conditions through the building. The final case suggests ways in which the analysis of the stylistic features of buildings may be linked to spatial analysis of the distribution of visual fields in buildings which have so far dominated space syntax research.