Over the last hundred years, buildings have become more complex and people are expecting to use a great variety of buildings and the greater complexity and diversity of use have caused the public to have greater problems in finding their way about. This lack of legibility has been heightened by the use of the 'clean modern movement' with its lack of symbols and not solved by post modern with its arbitrary use of symbols.
The complexity of contemporary architecture is mainly caused by advanced technology which enables architects to achieve very sophisticated buildings in terms of plan configuration, space organisation and internal treatments. This can make them illegible for users.
Examples of complexity and illegibility can be seen in shopping centres, hospitals, etc. With shopping centres, one can see the crowding of commercial and graphical signs, goods, lighting effects and colour. For hospitals, they have a tendency to grow in a piecemeal fashion, the paths can be extremely complex, intricate and unpredictable, routes often end in cul-dc-sacs. There arc parallel passages difficult to distinguish, open angles, etc. This lack of legibility makes these buildings difficult to use by people.
Unfortunately, there have been only a few attempts to study the legibility of building interiors, sonic of them concentrated on studying wayfinding in terms of sign systems, the others studied it from a limited point of view for a particular building wich cannot be considered as a general system to be applied in any building whatever its function or size.
Therefore, we studied the legibility of architectural interior space in a more comprehensive way by using modelscope techniques.
The research consists of eight complementary parts:
Chapter I deals with visual systems and the mechanism of perception, Chapters II and III cover the perception of space and interior space, Chapter IV deals with movement in buildings. Chapter V reviews most of the means which arc used in representing interior space in architecture, Chapter VI consists of the introduction to the research and the pilot study, Chapter VII is the main study, concerned with the examination of the legibility of interior space in architecture by using modelscope techniques, Chapter 8 is the conclusion.