USING ALGORITHMS TO ANALYSE THE VISUAL PROPERTIES OF A BUILDING’S STYLE

Residential development within heritage conservation areas is regulated by Development Control Plans (DCP) that provide guidelines about the shape and form that new houses, alterations and additions should take (DIPNR 2004). By understanding that the visual amenity of streets within a city plays an important role in creating a sense of place and community for its citizens (Lynch 1960) they attempt to sustain, through regulation, an urban pattern that has become valued by the community. The visual character of a building within a streetscape is often associated with the style of its construction - a set of visual characteristics that a group of buildings might share. These characteristics include the relationship of the parts of the building to each other, and to the building as a whole, the use of ornament and visible textures, and the scale of elements within the composition. Using algorithms developed within robotic research that enable a computer to interpret a visual environment (similar to those used in medicine and facial recognition for instance), this paper outlines how algorithms can be used to study the visual properties of the built environment. One of the methodological qualities of computer visualisation that makes it so useful for a comparative visual analysis of buildings is that the representational and symbolic meanings of a buildings style play no part. The organisation of the elements can be analysed without having to interpret their possible meaning at the beginning of the process. This paper builds on an established interdisciplinary approach, utilising architectural knowledge and computer visualisation to evaluate the visual character of detached housing within a heritage conservation area. The visual environment is analysed using computer software developed to locate the visual boundaries within a view of a streetscape both as an elevation and aerial view

Association of Architecture Schools in Australasia

"Techniques and Technologies: Transfer and Transformation", proceedings of the 2007 AASA Conference held September 27-29, 2007, at the School of Architecture, UTS

Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3

The Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia

The Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia. Each paper in the Proceedings has been double refereed by members of an independent panel of academic peers appointed by the Conference Committee. Papers were matched, where possible, to referees in the same field and with similar interests to the authors

Representations of streetscape perceptions through manifold learning in the space of Hough arrays

This study is part of a project which investigates computational principles which underlie perception and representation of architectural streetscape character. Some of the principles can be associated with fundamental concepts in brain theory and Gestalt psychology. For the experimental analysis streetscapes were represented by sequences of digital images of house facades which were prepared by a team of researchers from architecture. Two methods for non-linear dimensionality reduction, isomap and maximum variance unfolding, were applied to a set of Hough arrays (for lines) of the given images. An analysis of the extracted "streetmanifolds" revealed groupings of house facades with similar visual character and proportions. Comparative tests were conducted on a simple cylinder shaped example manifold to evaluate the geometric stability of the two dimensionality reduction methods. All experiments addressed variations of the distance metric and the neighbourhood parameter

Rethinking the risk matrix

So far risk has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL (being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the adverse event). The so called risk matrix follows from such definition. This definition of risk is justified in a long term “managerial” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen’s perspective to the definition of risk