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Posted at Feb 15/2005 10:16 AM:
Dennis Doxtater: In addition to a number of other interesting issues at the conference, I was intrigued at the overlap between archaeology and architecture with respect to the problem of how to link human experience with physical settings. Architects of course attempt to project such experiences into the future rather than into the past, as with archaeology. As an architect/ anthropologist I have felt it necessary to develop a particular strategy to make the human experience-physical setting connection. This appears in both my programming and design classes. The strategy is to consider five distinct kinds of environmental experience: wayfinding, visual and non-visual aesthetics, task performance, simple territories, and cultural expression. Some of you may be interested in this methodology and can visit the best applied example in the Post Occupancy Evaluation of La Paz Residence Hall here at the University of Arizona. A discussion of the hall's design constitutes one chapter in Peter Katz's "New Urbanism". The results of the evaluation, done by myself for the UA, can be found in web form at www.cfp.arizona.edu/planning_studies/reports_analyses/lapaz_poe/ If you check this out, please visit the portion concerning "future research" that outlines ways of using the five categories in two distinct modeling exercises of an ideal design process. While the attempt again is to see the future of human experiences in physical settings--without doing costly post-occupancy-evaluations--a similar methodology might well be used by archaeologists to better see the past. A much abbreviated version of the La Paz evaluation is coming out next month in the Journal of Architecture and Planning Research.
