Date

1986

Author

İmamoğlu, Vacit

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

420
views

308
downloads

Cite This

The research carried out, aimed to understand the meaning and structure of spaciousness of interiors and its relationship to some architectural variables like, window size, window position, room proportion. The exploratory studies aimed to understand the significance of the concept for assessing interiors and to gain some insight as to which variables need to be considered in the future experiments. These studies, consisting of open—ended questionnaires, card-sorting, survey of newspapers, suggested that spaciousness was an important construct on which people often based their descriptions and evaluations of interiors and that it was closely related to such variables as size, clutteredness and the general atmosphere of interiors. After this general investigation of the topic, the first part of the main study concentrated on the experimental assessment of specific variables related to the concept. The first experiment of this group explored the effect of furniture density on the spaciousness evaluations and size estimation of rooms. The results indicated that size and spaciousness were related but were referring to different concepts. An overfurnished room was assessed as being less spacious than both an empty and a furnished one; as for the size estimations, an empty room was seen larger than an overfurnised one. The next two studies examined the relationship between the function and desirable degree of spaciousness of rooms. Of these, the results of the first experiment indicated that people desire to carry out "intimate-personal" "social" and "public" activities in interiors with different degrees of spaciousness from the least to the most, respectively. The second one, which verified the early findings, was designed to clarify the results of the first experiment by controlling the number of people involed in the three groups of activities. The last group of studies in this part, aimed to examine the effect of window size, window position and room proportion on spaciousness evaluation of rooms. After a number of exploratory studies in real rooms, two main experiments were carried out with 1/10 scale, adjustable models . Results of these experiments indicated that, (a) rooms with windows on the short walls were assessed as being more spacious than the ones with windows on the long sides, and (b) rooms with smaller windows appeared less spacious. The following part of the research, which will be reported in this article, is concerned with the construction of a scale to measure the spaciousness of interiors. After construction of the scale, the last group of experimental studies utilized this scale aiming to get more specific information about the spaciousness and crampedness factors. The experimental studies examined the effects of such variables as: mediums of presentation (a real room, its 1/10 model, and its colored slide); organization (or orderliness) of furniture; window size, window position and room proportion; day versus night-time, open versus closed curtains; user-nonuser differences, and types of activities carried out in interiors.

URI

http://jfa.arch.metu.edu.tr/archive/0258-5316/1986/cilt07/sayi_2/127-142.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/51204

Collections

Department of Architecture, Article