This book evaluates how we experience and understand buildings in different ways depending upon our academic and professional background. With reference to Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Library, the book illustrates a range of different methods available through its application to the building. By seeing such a variety of different research methods applied to one setting, it provides the opportunity for researchers to understand how tools can highlight various aspects of a building and how those different methods can augment, or complement, each other.
Unique to this book are contributions from internationally renowned academics from fields including architecture, ethnography, architectural criticism, phenomenology, sociology, environmental psychology and cognitive science, all of which are united by a single, real-world application, the Seattle Central Library.
This book will be of interest to architects and students of architecture as well as disciplines such as ethnography, sociology, environmental psychology, and cognitive science that have an interest in applying research methods to the built environment.
About the Author: Ruth Conroy Dalton is Professor of Building Usability and Visualisation at the University of Northumbria at
Newcastle. She is an architect and her research interests are on the relationship between the spatial layout of buildings
and environments and how people understand, and interact in, those spaces.
Christoph Hölscher is Professor of Cognitive Science at ETH Zurich. He is a psychologist by training, and the
focus of his work is at the intersection of spatial cognition and architectural design.
