Narrating Spatio-Visual Experiences: Comparative Study on Two Museums of North India

The architecture of a place is characterized by users associated with it, making it more diverse. To make a space additionally expressive, architectural elements play a significant role. The experiences within a building are an integration of spatial and visual correlation that is overseen by user-space relationship. This research aims to examine gap between designer’s intentions and experienced realities through an in-depth analysis of spatio-visual experiences. Two museum buildings Jay Prakash Narayan Muaeum, Lucknow, India and Virasat-e Khalsa, Anandpur Sahib, India have been taken as case and parameters affecting same have been scrutinised. The study focusses on how users perceive a single space in multiple ways by keeping visual senses above all directing movement within building. The spatial character of a space is a result of an amalgamation of architectural elements and user-experiences, which is directly or indirectly imitated by the perception of different user-groups. This study uses computational analysis for measuring visual experiences by taking Isovists as a tool. The Qualitative and Quantitative methods have been integrated to comparatively analyse architectural character of two museum buildings. It was found that Jay Prakash Narayan Museum incorporates architectural elements with varying enclosures while Virasat-e-Khalsa focusses more on introvert character of space.