Exploring the Concept of Visibility and Explaining Qualitative Indicators of Visible Buildings for Designing Urban Signs based on Citizens’ Mental Images

Bigham, Kaniya; Karimi Azari, Amir Reza; Tarkashvand, Abbas

doi:10.22034/aaud.2024.343663.2671

Exploring the Concept of Visibility and Explaining Qualitative Indicators of Visible Buildings for Designing Urban Signs based on Citizens’ Mental Images

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Kaniya Bigham ¹

Amir Reza Karimi Azari ²

Abbas Tarkashvand ³

¹ Ph.D. Candidate of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.

² Associate Professor of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and Art, University of Guilan, Guilan, Iran.

³ Assistant Professor of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran (Corresponding Author).

10.22034/aaud.2024.343663.2671

Abstract

Visibility helps to create an image of an urban element in the user’s mind and advances their environmental perception. Today, the lack of landmark buildings whose visibility creates urban legibility and promotes the user’s perception of the city is being felt. For this, designing landmark buildings based on the visibility quality could be one of the main objectives of architects across the city. The question, however, is “What are the building indicators that make them urban signs due to their visibility?” To answer this question, the preset study first adopted a qualitative approach to explain theoretical foundations and describe five major indicators of visible buildings by employing library documents and examining available theories. Then, the study employed a field survey and a questionnaire to select as many as 14 landmark buildings with commercial and exhibitive uses and identical historical and semantic features on a regional scale across Tehran. Meanwhile, sixty people were asked to name the buildings they could recognize by referring to their own mental images and to describe the reasons for recording the buildings in their image memories based on five [visibility] indicators using a Likert scale (from very low to very high). They were also required to draw a sketch of the place where the buildings had been constructed. The questionnaire’s data were analyzed using descriptive statistics in the SPSS environment. To test the significance level of the hypothetical indicators, the variance analysis was used, with the three indicators of the buildings’ form and shape, the buildings’ location, and the buildings’ differences in appearance from the surrounding texture in 14 buildings held a significance level of higher than 95%. Results indicated that the five indicators of the buildings’ form and shape, the buildings’ location, and the buildings’ differences in appearance from the surrounding buildings, special lighting at night, and the materials used in the buildings contributed to the visibility of these 14 buildings, respectively, given the users’ frequency of selection. As known, the distinction between the buildings’ form and shape causes some differences in appearance from the surrounding buildings, while differences in appearance may be caused by color, rhythm, and other appearance-related features. Meanwhile, because previous studies focused primarily on visible buildings for, say, finding addresses and that users walk past them relatively hurriedly, they have failed to take the materials used in the landmark buildings into account, as, for example, special night lighting could make a landmark building qualify for visibility during a nightlife.

Keywords

Urban Signs

Mental Image

Visibility

Qualitative Indicators

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