Michael J. Ostwald

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · UNSW Built Environment

The frontispiece of the thirteenth century Bible Moralisee conserved in Vienna portrays a Christ-like figure leaning over a primordial world and using a pair of compasses to measure and inscribe its limits (Fig. 3.1). Titled ‘God as architect of the world’, it depicts the use of a mathematical instrument to determine the functional, symbolic and ae...

Fractal analysis is a method for measuring, analysing and comparing the formal or geometric properties of complex objects. In this book it is used to investigate eighty-five buildings that have been designed by some of the twentieth-century’s most respected and celebrated architects. Including designs by Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Frank Lloyd Wrigh...

Shape grammar and space syntax have been separately developed but rarely combined in any significant way. The first of these is typically used to investigate or generate the formal or geometric properties of architecture, while the second is used to analyze the spatial, topological, or social properties of architecture. Despite the reciprocal relat...

Creative arts organizations are constituted by intricate symbiotic relationships between diverse stakeholders, including creatives, technicians, software programmers and producers. These thrive when facilitated by clear, seamless and swift communication. Cyber-physical systems can support such exchange yet require careful aesthetic design. Inspired...

This chapter explores connections between place, community and narrative in the context of a world beset by extreme weather events. Drawing on insights and readings from three disciplines—theatre studies, screen studies and architecture—the chapter constructs a rich picture of the ways these fields contribute to definitions of place and can potenti...

Realistic immersive visualisation can provide a valuable method for studying extreme events and enhancing our understanding of their complexity, underlying dynamics and human impacts. However, existing approaches are often limited by their lack of scalability and incapacity to adapt to diverse scenarios. In this chapter, we present a review of exis...

Extreme climate events require people to rapidly navigate dynamically changing environments. Wildfires and floods alter the landscape, blocking roads, destroying landmarks and turning the built environment and infrastructure into potential hazards. While various computational methods exist for modelling the ways people move through buildings, urban...

At a time when wildfires and severe floods are challenging human society in unprecedented ways, we examine how immersive virtual environments can be used to enhance community preparedness for, and engagement with, disaster scenarios. Drawing on research from the fields of interaction design and participatory design, we explore the capacity of three...

This letter from the editor introduces Vol. 26(2) of the Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics. The research in this issue addresses two broad themes: the interpretation of historic buildings, ornamentation and materials, and the construction of complex, curvilinear architectural forms. The methods used in this issue range from archae...

Spatial experience has been extensively researched in various fields, with Space Syntax being one of the most widely used methodologies. Multiple Space Syntax techniques have been developed and used to quantitively examine the relationship between spatial configuration and human experience. However, due to the heterogeneity of syntactic measures an...

Architectural teams are increasingly reliant on remote and flexible working and, because of this, face a growing challenge around their collaborative operations across cultures and spaces. Central to this challenge is the knowledge gap between empirical evidence and practice with respect to cognitive, dynamic perspectives about online teamwork. To...

Various types of streetscapes have been the subject of past research, with university campus planning being identified as one example where a psychological impact has been observed. However, due to the visual complexity of campus streetscapes, little or no clear approach is available to quantitively assess their potential impacts. Furthermore, coll...

Advances in information and communication technologies have been the catalyst for substantial transformations in the field of architecture and in design education. In response to the pandemic, architectural education rapidly embraced digital design techniques, incorporating multimodal tools like virtual reality, online collaborative platforms, desi...

Architectural technology enables the creation, generation and sharing of innovative design solutions that have the potential to transform society. While most descriptions of architectural technology focus on its capacity for documentation, simulation, and transmission of design information, it would be equally valid to view it as providing support...

The focus of this chapter is multimodal and collaborative design in immersive virtual environments (IVEs). The research reported in this chapter aims to identify and examine barriers to effective collaborative design in IVEs and to demonstrate how these may be overcome. The chapter uses a two-stage method to address the aim, the first is a literatu...

While historically the design team was almost always co-located, physically sharing the same space, tools, and systems, over the last few decades, advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have broadened the definitions of collaboration and teamwork, to include a range of Computer-Supported Collaborative Workplaces (CSCW). Such CSC...

The Advanced Architectural Analytics Lab at UNSW is conducting a survey to investigate visual similarity in architectural character. This research will assist designers, builders, councils, and legal professionals to make better judgements about the visual properties of the built environment. This survey should only take 10 minutes to complete and...

During the first century BC, the famous Roman architect, Vitruvius, defined architecture as encompassing three essential properties: firmitas (firmness), utilitas (utility), and venustas (attractiveness or beauty) [...]

This letter from the editor introduces Vol. 25(3) of the Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics. The research in this issue addresses three interconnected themes, the first of which is the use of projective geometry to model vision or light. The second is about the geometric tiling and construction of surfaces and the final theme, whic...

This letter from the editor presents Vol. 25(2) of the Nexus Network Journal. This issue has two connected themes, the first is about the role of regular modules, patterns, or proportions in architecture, and the second, the ways rules or systems underpin architectural form. The papers in this issue address either regularity, rules, or in most case...

The architecture service industry has typically been slow in accepting new digital technologies widely due to many reasons, such as the industry’s complexity, the diverse sizes of companies, client types, and stakeholders’ technical skills. The combination of these business service factors with those that affect the intention of a user to use a tec...

This study presents an analysis of two aesthetic properties, complexity and diversity , in Palladian architecture. The former highlights the fractal dimension of façade geometry, and the latter its semantic randomness. Along with a methodological description and advice on settings, this study contributes to the discussion about mathematical beauty...

Characterising and predicting socio-spatial experience has long been a key research question in space syntax research. Due to the lack of synthesised knowledge about it, this review conducts the first systematic scoping review of space syntax research on the relationships between spatial properties and experiential values. Adopting the “Preferred R...

In a famous architectural discussion, Colin Rowe links the geometric properties of two sixteenth century villas by Andrea Palladio and two twentieth century villas by the architect Le Corbusier. Rowe observed that different structural systems produced heightened geometric complexity in cross sections through Palladio’s villas and in Le Corbusier’s...

Remote teamwork has become critical to the communicative and collaborative operations of architectural practice and education in Australia. Consequently, building information modeling (BIM) processes, which are core to both sharing and producing architectural designs, are evolving in response. The aim of this paper is to examine and identify ways t...

The fundamental goal of sustainable design for the built environment is to optimise the performance of buildings to minimise their impact on the environment. To achieve this goal, contemporary architects use a range of digital design environments, such as Computer-aided Design (CAD) or Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools. These allow archite...

The ‘visual attractiveness’ of a building façade refers to the extent to which it provokes an immediate or ‘pre-attentive’ physiological response. Two factors that can shape this response are ‘visual complexity’ and ‘strength of attraction’. The former refers to the innate capacity of a façade to draw the viewer's eye, and the latter to its capacit...

For over a decade, technology has been available to support design teams to operate in diverse physical locations and time zones. Despite this, until relatively recently designers have largely continued to work in physically co-located teams. This has all, however, changed in the last year, with designers in many countries being forced to work remo...

This letter from the editors introduces Vol. 24(3) of the Nexus Network Journal, which is the second special issue of selected papers from the Nexus 20/21 conference. The papers in this issue are categorised into four themes: (i) spatial distortion and perception, (ii) computational design methods, (iii) design concepts in historical examples and (...

Purpose In the 1947 article, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa , Colin Rowe famously compared the spatial and geometric properties of buildings by two architects: Palladio and Le Corbusier. Many of Rowe's observations in this article have since been extensively debated but not rigorously tested. This paper examines Rowe's proposition that Palladio...

The famous modernist architect Richard Neutra argued that movement through, and understanding of a building could be choreographed by controlling the visual stimuli that is available to a person. These claims are tested by quantifying the lines of sight and intelligibility of five of Neutra's residential designs. A computational method, weighted ax...

This letter from the editors commences by reporting on Nexus 20/21, the 13th international, interdisciplinary conference for architecture and mathematics. This event took place in July 2021 as an online conference. From over 50 presentations at the conference, the Scientific Committee nominated a series of works for potential inclusion in two speci...

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the world’s most famous architects, produced several masterworks in his career, possibly the most celebrated of which is the Kaufmann House, better known as Fallingwater. One of the common arguments historians make about this house is that it is unique in Wright’s oeuvre, as it is not similar to other designs he produced...

Past research in design typically postulates a relationship between divergent thinking and ideation, but little or no empirical evidence is available to critically assess the connection between the two. Using protocol analysis of 35 design experiments, this paper constructs a detailed investigation of the ways divergent thinking and ideation occur...

Natural hazards can have substantial destructive impacts on the built environment. Providing effective services in disaster areas is heavily reliant on maintaining or replacing infrastructure; thus, post-disaster reconstruction of infrastructure has attracted growing attention. Due to the complex and dynamic nature of infrastructure recovery projec...

Purpose Frank Lloyd Wright's famous house Fallingwater has been the subject of enduring scholarly debate centred on the allegedly clear parallels between its form and that of its surrounding natural setting. Despite these claims being repeated many times, no quantitative approach has ever been used to test this argument. In response, this paper use...

The Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley, Australia’s longest coastal catchment, is spanned by a river system of more than 470 km, that runs from Goulburn to Broken Bay, covering a total area of over 2.2 million hectares. This region has remained prone to flood events, with considerable mortalities, economic impacts and infrastructural losses occurring quite r...

A Justified Plan Graph (JPG) method uses graph mathematics to measure the connectivity properties of an architectural plan, providing insights into how a building may have been used, or how it differs from other buildings. The standard JPG method has several practical limitations that are evident when it is used to study relatively simple planning,...

This paper uses a combined method – survey and semi-structured interviews – to evaluate the perceived effectiveness of digital design environments for supporting architects’ sustainable design practices. In most contemporary firms, architects’ sustainable design aspirations are reliant on the use digital design tools and associated computational pl...

A growing majority of people living in Residential Care Facilities (RCFs) for older people have dementia. Yet the implementation of evidence-based Dementia Design Principles (DDPs), known to reduce symptoms and improve wellbeing, remains limited. This paper reports on the development and application of Plan-EAT, a floorplan-based method of assessin...

The fourth industrial era, known as ‘Industry 4.0’ (I4.0), aided and abetted by the digital revolution, has attracted increasing attention among scholars and practitioners in the last decade. The adoption of I4.0 principles in Disaster Risk Management (DRM) research and associated industry practices is particularly notable, although its origins, im...

In architectural research, debates about the development, function, or appropriateness of building forms have traditionally been dominated by qualitative approaches. These have been common in the past because the full geometric complexity of a building has proven difficult to encapsulate in any single measurement system. Even simple buildings may b...

Integration of the lean and resilience paradigms has attracted increasing attention among scientists and practitioners. In an interconnected world, the need to be resilient involves increased readiness to deal with risks from both outside and inside an enterprise, and to be lean involves maximizing value while minimizing waste. The combination of t...

An important “architectural type” in Iranian history is the Yazd courtyard house. This historic building type features a walled boundary that contains a complex pattern of open (to the sky), semi-enclosed and enclosed spaces. The planning of the courtyard in these houses has typically been interpreted as either a response to changing socio-cultural...

Purpose The independence and well-being of people with dementia can be significantly influenced by the design of the physical environments around them. Several assessment tools exist to evaluate the dementia design quality of existing residential aged care facilities but, to date, none have been formally identified as suitable for use during the de...

Since architect Nicholas Negroponte first proposed a vision of responsive architecture smart environments have been widely investigated, especially in the fields of computer science and engineering. Despite growing interest in the topic, a comprehensive review of research about smart environments from the architectural perspective is largely missin...

In recent decades, there has been an increase in online learning in many disciplines including architecture. In 2020, this situation accelerated as architecture programs world-wide transitioned to online learning. This paper uses surveys and semi-structured interviews to evaluate the effectiveness of online teaching for architecture courses. A tota...

The design of a building façade has a significant impact on the way people respond to it physiologically and behaviourally. Few methods are available to assist an architect to understand such impacts during the design process. Thus, this paper examines the viability of using two computational methods to examine potential visual stimulus-sensation r...

In an increasingly globalised world, design educators face challenges of complex linguistic and cultural differences in their studios and critique systems. While general issues relating to globalisation and education have been discussed in past research, this paper is focused on improving the teaching and learning environment created by design educ...

Andrea Palladio's Renaissance villas are amongst the most famous and widely studied examples of domestic architecture ever produced. The majority of past research about Palladio's architecture employed historical, mathematical and computational methods to analyse their complex proportional systems and rules. In contrast, this paper examines three o...

Decision-making in design is a cognitive process wherein alternatives are generated and evaluated, potentially enabling a more creative design process. In recent years parametric design’s heightened capacity for automatically generating and evaluating options has been celebrated by researchers and designers, but it has also placed an increased emph...

This chapter uses the results of two studies to develop an understanding of different types of design strategies and their connection to creativity in design. Two sets of experimental data are used to capture these strategies and then correlate them to readings of novice or expert practices, and the production of conventional or creative designs. T...

This chapter investigates cross-national aspects of design thinking, with a focus on three themes: design cognition, complexity and spatial language. The chapter uses a new method, a dual-coding system (design cognition and language) for protocol data combined with linkography. This system formally captures cognitive and linguistic characteristics...

The final chapter in this book reflects on the findings, models and frameworks presented previously. The first part, “creative design thinking” revisits the results of two cognitive studies (Chap. 2) and the qualitative analysis and quantitative measures of complexity developed for design thinking (Chaps. 3 and 4). The second part, “collaborative d...

Past research has theorised that high levels of individual cognitive complexity may result in heightened design thinking and creativity. The precise relationship, however, between cognitive complexity and creativity in design remains largely unexplored. This chapter develops two measures of cognitive complexity in design: content complexity and str...

This chapter examines two cognitive issues in collaborative design: team cognition and communication. It commences with a detailed review of past research, before developing a new framework for design team cognition. This framework is built around an understanding of individual, team and distributed mental models and cognitive behaviours, including...

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the actual, rather than theorised, relationship between cognitive activities and creativity in design. Focussing on parametric design, the chapter uses protocol data developed from four cognitive activities—changing parameters, perceiving geometries, introducing algorithmic ideas and evaluating geometrie...

This chapter investigates the relationship between language and cognition in design. This is a critical topic for supporting effective multi-national design teams, and it also illuminates assumptions about design’s capacity to function as a type of universal language. The chapter reports on the results of a design experiment where 23 participants f...

Because design thinking is contextual, insomuch as it varies depending on the tools being used and the environments that support it, there is a need to understand the cognitive impacts of any new platforms that are developed. The focus of this chapter is design thinking in digital, interactive and collective platforms. Drawing on past research, mod...

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an approach to computer-enabled multi-disciplinary collaboration, communication and coordination. A BIM model is a consolidated digital data repository of a design, which facilitates seamless information exchange between stakeholders during a project lifecycle. BIM is the industry standard in the design and c...

This chapter provides a background to the concept of “design thinking”, as it is defined and used in the field of design research. Thereafter, the chapter introduces three themes in design thinking—creativity, collaboration and culture—which have become increasingly important in the last decade. It briefly describes the content and structure of the...

Architectural historians describe Adolf Loos’s 1928 Moller House as having an interior spatial arrangement that constructs unequal or asymmetrical visual interactions between inhabitants, putting some on display and positioning others as observers. However, there is disagreement about the specific way the Moller House creates these relationships. T...

This paper develops a statistical approach to measuring and guiding grammatical applications using a descriptive shape grammar, ‘Murcutt Grammar’. Normalised Distance (ND) is proposed to identify the level of disparity of each design instance. Alternative design instances are generated using rule transition paths that illustrate the transition sequ...

This chapter uses a combined syntactical and grammatic method to analyse nineteen of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses. The purpose of this analysis is to illuminate the formal and social properties of Wright’s early architecture. The data developed through this process is used to provide mathematical insights into the topological and geometric p...

This chapter introduces three Space Syntax techniques – axial line analysis, convex space analysis and visibility graph analysis (VGA). Conventional applications of the axial line technique typically range from domestic buildings to urban environments, providing a quantitative understanding of spatial configurations. Convex space analysis is typica...

This book presents new ways of facilitating design thinking, through the combination of cognitive design strategies and information technologies. It provides readers with an in-depth understanding of the traditional and digital design processes and activities that are employed in architecture, computational design, communication design and graphic...

Geometry plays a number of fundamental roles in architecture: as support for structure, as an enrichment of experience, as a powerful design tool, as an endower of beauty. Such additional factors for the examination of geometry—including the impact of perception, representation, construction and reception—are crucial for understanding architectural...

This paper investigates the cognitive design processes of three groups of architectural designers from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. At the core of the research is a triple-coding system for protocol analysis, which formally captures both cognitive and linguistic characteristics in architectural design. The results of the experimen...

One of the most widely accepted theories about Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture is that he employed a recurring pattern of spatial and visual relations in his planning, to control the experience of movement through his houses. Known as the ‘Wright Space’, this theory has recently begun to be tested using computational and mathematical mea...

Cognitive complexity is a psychological concept that is used to analyse different approaches to problem solving, activity prioritising, information clustering and abstraction. This paper develops a combined approach utilising protocol analysis and linkography to measure the cognitive complexity of parametric design processes. The approach is select...

A traditional Chinese private garden (TCPG) is a historically important spatial type of garden that is well-known for its rich experiential properties. Although several theories have been used to explain the creation of these experiential properties, little evidence exists for any of the current explanations because TCPGs are complex environments a...

This paper presents a cognitive study that evaluates design creativity in parametric design environments, in relation to more conventional geometric modelling environments. The study correlates the results of design outcome evaluations and design process analysis. To achieve this comparison, a combined method of jury evaluation and protocol analysi...

Drawing on the theory of semiotics, this research measures the differences between a non-expert web crowd and an expert design group, when communicating using varying forms of digital representation in a web-based environment. Using an online tool to capture the interactions in each group, the paper analyses how they independently engage in a desig...

In architectural research, debates about the development, function, or appropriateness of building forms have traditionally been dominated by qualitative approaches. These have been common in the past because the full geometric complexity of a building has proven difficult to encapsulate in any single measurement system. Even simple buildings may b...

This “Letter from the Editors” begins with reflections on frameworks for research and development of architectural knowledge. Drawing on the both old and new ways of thinking, the editors show how two forms of knowledge—observational and propositional—have figured in the identification of two types of architects: architectus ingenio, the observer a...

This chapter provides an overview of Space Syntax theory and its associated analytical techniques, four of which are used in later chapters to examine various arguments about Modern architecture.

Part II of this book examined a series of twenty Modernist villas using a range of mathematical techniques for testing well-known claims about form, function and intelligibility. The focus of Part III is on the analysis of various elements or features in the domestic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright which have previously been linked to particular...

The famous Modernist axiom, ‘form follows function’, suggests that the programmatic needs of a design, its function, should both precede and take precedence over decisions about its aesthetic expression or form.