Car parks and parking structures have been a source of inspiration for filmmakers, photographers and writers.  Yet to the people who use them, they’re not much more than a functional area one would rather leave as quickly as possible. Associations are often negative: too cold, too dark, too stinky and too insecure.

We went out on the streets in The Hague and asked different users how they experienced the parking areas they left their cars in. Two large parking areas were researched:
1. Grote Markt (part of a tramtunnel by OMA); a double height area with a length of approximately  2 km.
2. Lutherse Burgwal; a standard parking tower with many levels (split level concept).

These are the positive findings:

These are the negative findings:

We found similar results in our research as in scientific articles on parking garages, most importantly: adequate lighting (1) and visible opportunities for users to escape from the parking garage. Because adequate lighting and prospect (i.e., visibility into an environment that provides few hiding places for potential offenders) decrease the perception of danger in urban public spaces, especially in spaces where low opportunity for escape cannot be altered (e.g., bridges and parking garages).(2)
One of the interesting findings in our small user experience research is that people prefer parking garages with only a few levels instead of the often built parking towers. Even a very long parking garage is preferred over a small parking garage with more levels.

As the ones we’ve visited, car parks don’t usually tickle our imagination and people think of them as functional elements only. Innovative planners and creative designers have come up with new and refreshing ways of approaching car park design.
In HongKong plans are being made for a modern parking tower which houses space for concerts, fashionshows, artexhibitions and filmprojections.
A fun example of wayfinding is the parking garage of the Hotel Puerta America in Madrid.

Parking areas like these are not just about user-experience on a basic level (fulfilling needs like safety, recognisability, accessibility and cleanness), their aim lies on a higher level of being an experience on their own. It is important to focus on the needs and wishes of the users of certain parking garages. For example people who go out glamorously dressed to a theater prefer to park their car in a similarly glamorous environment instead of a grey concrete cold parking garage.
Parking could even be taken to a level of functioning as a restorative environment.  Restorative environments provide relief from stress and/or attention fatigue. Restoration is a process that begins to occur when four factors are present in the person-environment interaction:

1. getting away from one’s usual context,
2. fascination
3. extent or immersion
4. compatibility.⁽³⁾

This means that a parking space should become a favorite place to be, an fascinating environment which allows you to forget your daily troubles.
Imagine you can park your car at hut 12 on the Maldives, or on a place with a wonderful view into a garden, or a place with a movie projected on the wall in front of you, or even into a cloud.

Parking areas should always aim to answer to the basic requirements of their users. At the same time they have enormous potential to influence our daily experience. Not as dark areas of criminal intent, but a positive surrounding people talk about and want to spent some time.

References

1. C. Tseng, J. Duane, and F. Hadipriono; (2004) Performance of Campus Parking Garages in Preventing Crime; Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities Volume 18 Issue 1.
2. A. Blöbaum and M. Hunecke; (2005) Perceived Danger in Urban Public Space: The Impacts of Physical Features on Personal Factors; Environment and Behavior Volume 37 Issue 37
3. K. Korpela and T. Hartig; (1996) Restorative Qualities of Favorite Places; Journal of Environmental Psychology Volume 16 Issue 3.

Post written by Paul de Vries and Simon Droog. Follow us on Twitter.

New here at Experiencing Architecture and have no idea where to start? Just read our post on How to design atmospheres attuned to the concerns of the user to get you started.

This is another post from our series Architectural means. In this series we try to discover which means we have as architects to create atmospheres attuned to the concerns of the user. If you have any thoughts or things to add about colour in architecture after reading this, just drop us a line on Twitter.

Colour is a very powerful mean in architecture. Many books are written about the effect of colour, but they are not always telling us the same story. Contradictions can be easily found, because it is hard not to be subjective with such a topic. Another problem with making general conclusions is the fact that colours have different meanings in different cultures. For example, in most parts of Europe black is for mourning, though in northern parts of Portugal, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe as well, brides wear black gowns on their wedding day. In China and other parts of East Asia white is the colour of mourning and in most of Europe it is the colour of purity; worn by the bride at her wedding (KRESS, G. and VAN LEEUWEN, T (2002) – Colour as a semiotic mode: notes for a grammar of colour – free to download as pdf).

But it is still possible to make some general conclusions about the effects of colour. In Expression of material, we saw in the example of Fallingwater that light painted materials seem lighter than dark coloured materials. Other visual effects of colour can make things look further away or more distant; larger or smaller; cooler or warmer. For example, a cool blue bathroom and warm red living room. Association plays a very important role with experiencing colours; we do not only associate blue with cold water and red with fire, but also red shingles with bricks. And why do most Scandinavian people paint their wooden houses red or yellow? The Swedish art historian Erik Lundberg believes that the Scandinavian use of deep red paint on the exterior of houses is started as an imitation of the much grander red brick manor houses of the wealthy (from LUNDBERG, E. in RASMUSSEN, S.E (1964) – Experiencing Architecture, p. 216 – Amazon affiliate link). Later generations imitated stucco houses and their light colours, like the often used light yellow. Buildings are also painted to create a unity between different materials.

Colour can also have a very symbolic meaning. You can think about signals, national colours or uniform colours. Another interesting aspect of colour is their psychological and physiological effect on people, like the red tablecloth in a restaurant giving you an exiting feeling and letting your digestion work more, or the soothing effect of green (from RASMUSSEN, S.E. (1964) – Experiencing Architecture, p. 218 – affiliate link).

But how we experience colour depends on the surrounding colours, the level of saturation, and what kind of light falls on it. Rasmussen says about the light effect on colours: “Warm and cold colors play an important role in our lives and express very different moods and emotions. We experience them in the variations of daylight from morning to evening. It is true that the eye adjusts itself to the gradual change so that the local colors of details appear the same throughout the day. But if we observe the whole as a unit – a landscape or a street scene – we become aware of the changes in the color scheme. The entire mood changes with the changing light.” (from RASMUSSEN, S.E. (1964) – Experiencing Architecture, p. 221 – affiliate link).

Other Architectural Means

If you like our post on colour, go ahead and have a look at the other parts from our Architectural means series here > Architectural Means.

And if you have something to add from your own experience with colour, just drop us a line on Twitter.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Wouter Tooren. Learn more about Wouter and his work here.

Every year hundreds of buildings, both small and large, are being built and renovated in The Netherlands. Wouldn’t it be great if we could predict beforehand whether a building will work for its client and its users, or whether it will fail? Well we can up to a certain degree, and post occupancy evaluation (POE) is a valuable asset to achieve this goal.

This paper does not intend to present a full scope on the subject. Rather its intention is to present a comprehensible picture for the uninitiated what POE is and how POE in general is done. It tries to give an introduction to the subject and displays how clients can use post occupancy evaluation, especially within the field of environmental psychology, to create a better place to live and work, and with a higher turnover and profit for their organisation or company. The paper starts with the question: what is post occupancy evaluation?

What is post occupancy evaluation?
POE has grown over the years to become a popular tool to for a wide variety of organisations and businesses. As such it has become an umbrella term for investigating buildings for its value and quality. In the last few years, POE has become increasingly active in understanding design criteria, predicting the effectiveness of emerging designs, reviewing completed designs, and supporting building activation and facilitation management (Preiser & Scgramm, 1997, Zimring, 2002). A number of authors have tried to give a definition on the subject, and we will discuss two of them here.

Theo van der Voordt and Herman van Wegen (2002) call POE ‘the process of systematically collecting data on occupied built environments, analysing this these data, and comparing them to performance criteria’. In this sense, POE focuses particularly on user’s needs, preferences and experiences, and results are used to create guidelines for future projects. Technical aspects play a role to the extent that they influence users, i.e. through climate or lighting.

Wiess (1997) proposed for POE the more general definition of: ‘the systematic assessment of the process of delivering buildings or other designed settings or of the performance of those settings as they are actually used, or both, as compared to a set of implicit or explicit standards, with the intention of improving the process or setting’.

Notice that in both definitions usage plays a big role. Most POEs try to explore how well a building functions in comparison to what the building tried to accomplish from the start.
However, by focusing on usage, a split is being formed between functional quality and aesthetic quality. For this reason, total building performance evaluation (BPO) emerged in an attempt to find integration between usage, technique, aesthetics and technology.

For most POEs, the degree of focus on usage, technique, aesthetics or technology depends for a large part on the question that has to be answered. For example, a consultancy firm that tries to optimise their work environment will probably look more into usage than an architecture faculty that tries to define beauty in aesthetics.

Post occupancy evaluation methods
In general, most POE research uses methods like surveys, observations and interviews to assess user satisfaction and functionality. A more recent trend is to include technical performance, cost and other factors that relate to cost/benefit and organisational effectiveness (Cohen, Standeven, Bordass and Leaman, 2001a, 2001b). Heerwagen (2001) proposes to use a ‘balanced scoreboard’ approach that includes elements such as financial performance, impact of building on the business process, growth and satisfaction of employees, and impact on other stakeholders. This lifts POE out of the academic domain and more into the domain of value for society and business. I think this is a good development as it might create more awareness on quality design and underlines the importance of developing researched strategies for your buildings, rather than just ideas or concepts that may or may not work at all.

Another trend is the growing use of standardised methods for specific building use such as schools, hospitals and other function specific environments. Also for the assessment of technical specifications like air quality, tools have been developed (Zimring, 2002, Van der Voordt and van Wegen, 2002). The good news about these tools is the greater possibility for clients to have their visions and strategies worked out into goals and targets for building design, based on a growing volume of comparable knowledge about what worked in the past and what did not.

Care must be taken however for the inherent danger that standardisation contains. Some authors argue that each decision-making process must be socially constructed by the participants (Zimring, 2002). In other words; the specific context of a building must never be left out of our sight. Schneekloth and Shibley (1995) place this nicely into words by arguing that programming, design and evaluation are great ways for organisations to develop and change, but only if care is being given to existing values and perspectives of stakeholders. If we always use pre-existing models for correct solutions or approaches, we will neglect the uniqueness inherent in every group of individuals.

What is the value of post occupancy evaluation for your organization?
Why should an organisation decide to invest in POE? There are a number of reasons why investing in POE can have large returns on the long and short-term. First of all, when companies relocate, it tends to create a lot of disturbance along the personnel. Some workers might be happy, others might be discontent with the new building. POE can help investigate how the relocation influences personnel and which matters are urgent enough that they need direct attention. When a problem on the work floor arises, POE can be used to investigate physical causes for the problem.

In a broader sense, POE can also be used to monitor how the building influences the employees. In this way, POE acts as a kind of quality control, looking for ways to enhance the environment and diagnose problems should they occur. If done on a regular basis, POE can also be used as a base for strategic decisions by adding a statistical argument. All in all, POE can be used both at the higher management level for guarding and creating housing strategies, and at midlevel management to evaluate and steer performance.

The unique benefit of environmental psychology
Environmental psychologists form a unique benefit for POE because they are well equipped to represent the non paying client, e.g. the users of the building, by acting as a liaison on their behalf. Environmental psychologists are specialists in the relationship between buildings and behaviour. They have knowledge about both behaviour and about the physical environment. This makes them ideal to apply social and organisational research knowledge in a physical context.

Environmental psychologists can raise arguments about user behaviour from the naïve theory level to the scientific level, making it possible to create environments that support strategic goals. For example, say a company has intense collaboration as one of its chief long-term goals. An environmental psychologist is then the preferred choice to investigate whether the environment that the company uses facilitates what we know about what promotes collaboration. The fact that environmental psychologists are behavioural researchers pur sang makes them ideal for this kind of research.

An example of how post occupancy research can help organisations function better
An example from my own research might shed more light on the strategic use of POE. In the hypothetical situation underneath, a design firm uses a building with a rectangular floor plan shaped in the figure 8. One of the main goals of the firm is to maximise collaboration, in order to fully make use of the potential intellectual capacity that the organisation has to reach its targets. This can be achieved by promoting face to face contact along workers.

Through analysing the floor plan on integration of walking paths, and by doing observational research, we can find out if the floor plan supports the goal to create more face to face contact. As it turns out, workers on one side of the figure 8 barely, if any at all, communicate with workers on the other side of the building, thereby leaving out valuable information that might help workers to enhance or speed up their work (see figure A).

By spreading service places like copiers, kitchen corners and meeting rooms on both sides of the building, workers are forced to travel from their own region to the other side of the building, thus enhancing the possibility for spontaneous face to face contact with workers on the other side of the building. This results in a better integrated social network, with a better overall organisational performance in terms of actual achievement versus potential achievement within the available resources of the organisation.

The example above wouldn’t be possible without the help of post occupancy evaluation. I hope this small introduction has shed some light on the subject and has inspired potential clients to use POE as a strategic tool to fulfil their own organisational goals. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them.

Who is Wouter Tooren?
Wouter Tooren is currently in his final semester of his master applied cognitive psychology at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently performing his final research project in collaboration with the Center for People and Buildings (CfPB) in Delft on how office lay-outs can be used as a strategic tool to raise group performance on knowledge work. He maintains a blog about environmental psychology (in dutch) on http://www.buildingsenses.nl.

References

1. Cohen, R., Standeven, M., Bordass, B., & Leaman, A. (2001a). Assessing building performance in use 1: The Probe process. Building Research and Information, 29(2), 85-102.
2. Cohen, R., Standeven, M., Bordass, B., & Leaman, A. (2001b). Assessing building performance in use 2: Technical performance of the Probe buildings. Building Research and Information. 29(2), 103-114.
3. Heerwagen, J.H. (2001, March 13). A balanced scorecard approach to post-occpancy evalutation: Using the tools of business to evaluate facilities. Paper presented at the Federal Facililties Council Synposium on Building Performance Assessments: Current and Evolving Practices for Post Occupancy Evaluation Programs, Washington, DC.
4. Preiser, W.F.E., & Scgramm, U. (1997). Building performance evaluation. In J. DeChiara, J. Panero, & M. Zelnik (Eds.), Time-saver standards (7 ed., pp. 233-238). New York: McGraw-Hill.
5. Schneekloth, L.H., & Shibley, R.G. (1995). Placemaking: The art and practice of building communities. New York: Wiley.
6. Van der Voordt, T. & van Wegen, H. (2002). Ex post evaluation of buildings. In: ways to study and research urban architectural and technical design, pp. 151-158. Delft: DUP Science.
7. Zimring, C. (2002). Post occupancy evaluation: Issues and Implementation. In: Handbook of environmental psychology, pag. 306-319. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Inc.

Post written by Paul de Vries and Simon Droog. Follow them on Twitter.

This is part 4 of our Light in Architecture series. If you missed the previous parts, you can find them here:

1. Without light, no architecture?
2. Light – City Hall Gothenburg
3. Light – Dutch Canal Houses

In this part we’ll talk about one of the famous projects by Le Corbusier – The Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut.

“Light and shadow reveal form.” (1)
– LE CORBUSIER (1965) Textes et dessin pour Ronchamp

The Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut, one of Le Corbusier’s later works, is in big contrast with his earlier buildings with daylight flooded rooms. He created a church interior which had “the emotional appeal that is based on the shadowed dimness of indirect lighting, in which form is only vaguely revealed.” (2)

At the time of its completion in 1954, the Chapel at Ronchamp shocked the critics who went to see it. Pevsner complained of a retreat into “irrationality”, thus betraying his prejudice that Le Corbusier’s earlier works had been somehow “rational”. (3) Le Corbusier himself wrote to the client: “I have not experienced the miracle of faith but I have often known the miracle of inexpressible space, the apotheosis of plastic emotion”. (4) Later, he wrote that he was interested in “the effect of architectural forms and the spirit of architecture in the construction of a vessel of intense concentration and meditation” and in what he called “an acoustic component in the domain of form”. In other words, he sought to evoke spiritual emotions through the play of form, space and light, and without recourse to any obvious church typology. (5)

From a distance you can see the white tower sticking out of the woods and the more you climb up the hill the more of the white walls of the church will be revealed. This route is probably influenced by the procession to the Parthenon. As you come nearer you discover that there is not one plane surface, the entire building curves and swells into an extraordinary composition. You need to walk around to grasp a bit of its complex form and to find the entrance. Entering the building the first thing that strikes you is that it is very dark. After your eyes have adjusted to the darkness, you will discover the beautiful mystic light. Light coming through deep piercings of unequal size in the thick right wall. From the outside these piercings seemed to be only tiny windows, but inside they open up into large white embrasures that cast a great deal of reflected light into the dim room. Some of the small windows are painted and bring some coloured light in the chapel. Between the white walls and the grey concrete ceiling is a very narrow opening which admits just the right amount of light to show texture of the casted concrete ceiling. The towers appear in the interior as apses, recessed enlargements of the room. These white painted apses are lighted with indirect light from above shed magic light over the curved walls. The light creates the effect of enclosed space, like a campfire does in the darkness.

“Light and shadow reveal form.” (1)
– LE CORBUSIER (1965) Textes et dessin pour Ronchamp

Light alone can already create the effect of enclosed space.

Feedback?
If you have any questions or remarks, just drop us a line in the comment section below of send us an email through the contact page.

New here at Experiencing Architecture and have no idea where to start? Just read our post on How to design atmospheres attuned to the concerns of the user to get you started.

References

1. PEVSNER, N. (1966) Nikolaus Pevsner on the Anti-Pioneers
2. STIRLING, J. (1956) Ronchamp; Le Corbusier’s Chapel and the Crisis of Rationalism
3. CURTIS, W.J.R. (1996) Modern Architecture Since 1900 (p. 419)
4. LE CORBUSIER (1954) Le Modulor and Modulor 2 [ENGLISH EDITION] (p. 32)
5. LE CORBUSIER (1953) Le Corbusier – Oeuvre complete, Vol. 5: 1946-1952 (French, English and German Edition) (p.88)

Post written by Paul de Vries and Simon Droog. Follow them on Twitter.

This is part 3 of our Light in Architecture series. If you missed the previous parts, you can find them here:

1. Without light, no architecture?
2. Light – City Hall Gothenburg

In this part we’ll continue with a short essay on light in Dutch canalside houses. If you have any questions or remarks afterwards, just drop us a line in the comment section below of send us an email through the contact page.

Light in Dutch canal houses
Light from one direction > plasticity + texture

Probably the most instructive examples of good lighted spaces are the Dutch canal houses. These typically Dutch houses are deep, tall and narrow. All the light had to come from the windows in front and rear, because the deep side walls were usually shared with the neighbouring houses. As a result, there could be no openings in these side walls. This is why these houses had large window openings to provide enough light for the rooms. In the time they were build, glass was so expensive and difficult to procure that the larger lower parts of the windows were equipped with shutters only, while the upper parts had fixed leaded panes. In bad weather the light which came trough the small glass panes above had to suffice, because only during good summer days the shutters could be opened so that the inhabitants could look outside and let the light flow in. Later when glass was less scarce, the lower parts of the windows were also glazed, but the shutters were retained. Even the upper parts where sometimes equipped with shutters, in which case they opened into the room. This produced a four framed window with a shutter for each frame that could be opened or closed independently so the light could be regulated at will. Curtains and hangings perfected this four-shutter system. The rich merchants who lived in these well-lighted houses could enjoy the textural effects of their mostly expensive interiors with Orient porcelain and beautifully wooden carved furniture.

The famous Dutch painters of the seventeenth century took full advantage of the many lighting possibilities of these houses. The best documented paintings of the lighting of Dutch interiors are the works of Johannes Vermeer. He lived and worked his entire life in the city of Delft with its many canal houses. In these houses he made his masterpieces, with almost always the light coming from the left. In the painting “The Music Lesson” (fig. 2) we can see how the room is lighted when all the shutters are open. The rearmost window is right up against the wall and the light coming through shows us even the texture of the white plastered wall. The shadows of the mirror and the virginal are softened by reflected light and especially by light coming from the other windows. Also the plasticity of the jug of wine produced by the light is beautifully painted by Vermeer.

In the painting “Woman Holding a Balance” (fig. 3) the light comes from the upper half of the rearmost window and it is further dimmed by curtains. This strong light from one direction creates big contrasts and shows the enormous plasticity of the clothes of the woman. In this way you can go through all of Vermeers works and determine just how he obtained the right light for each of his paintings.

Feedback?
In part 4, we’ll talk more about the amazing light in one of Le Corbusier’s masterpieces. In the mean time let me know about your ideas on light in architecture. If you have anything to add… please leave a comment below or drop us a line through the contact page.

References

1. RASMUSSEN, S.E. (1962) Experiencing Architecture, 2nd Edition (p. 199) – affiliate link