Measuring the Cognitive Dimension of Space Integrating the user’s perception in the syntactic analysis of a house

Space syntax analysis postulates that a spatial system reveals its social meaning through its configuration. In the building analysis, defining the discreteness of each unit of space is the first step to measure its connectedness. In doing so, walls and partitions are the most reliable physical entities to demarcate convex spaces. This paper proposes that reality is more fine-grained than the partitioned space, and there are possible ways to incorporate this unexplored cognitive dimension in the spatial analysis. We took an urban vernacular house in Seoul built in 1930s as a case to experiment how a sequence of going into the house can be analysed in a higher resolution. Walking through the house, what fascinates visitors is the richness of perceptual sensation that can never be captured by merely looking at its floor plan. It will be explained how a journey through 6 partitioned spaces are experienced as 16 different spatial arrangements, each of which evokes changing mode of human behaviour. What generates this denser perception is the continuous change in floor levels and ceiling heights, a rhythmic pattern of ups and downs with varying degrees of pitches and lengths, resembling a musical score. By precisely measuring the intensity of each subdivided unit of space, this research shows how cognitive properties in space can be incorporated in the syntactic analysis.