Prospect & Refuge Case Studies
Sustainable Urban Biophilia: The Case of Greenskins for Urban Density
Grant Revell, Jenny Jönssen, Chalmers School of Architecture
Through an experimental investigation of designing living green walls in urban Fremantle, this paper challenges the conventional “triple-bottom-line” approach to sustainable dense urban systems by addressing the greater aesthetic needs of sustainability and its thinking.
A Prospect-Refuge Approach to Seat Preference: Environmental psychology and spatial layout
Chrystala Psathiti and Kerstin Sailer, Conference: 11th International Space Syntax Symposium
His approach investigates the ways in which environment furnishes human spatial behavior as well as individual’s responses to information retrieved by his or her immediate stimuli. Despite the fact that scholarly work in this field has provided valuable conclusions about social functioning in various spatial settings, the spatial context is usually conceptualized as if unstructured and without distinctive physical or organizational properties as a spatial whole. For these reasons several approaches from the built environment tried to address this gap by combining space syntax theoretical and methodological tools with key concepts from the field of environmental psychology and examined spatial cognition, movement, way finding, navigation and visual perception.
Constructing a Critical Definition for Architecture and Design
Annemarie S. Dosen, Michael J. Ostwald, The International Journal of Design in Society
The theory of “prospect and refuge” seeks to describe why certain environments feel secure and thereby meet basic human psychological needs. Environments that meet such needs will often provide people with the capacity to observe (prospect) without being seen (refuge). Since its original proposition in 1975, prospect-refuge theory has been discussed and debated by art historians and philosophers and it has also been put into practice by landscape designers. However, it wasn’t until 1991, when Grant Hildebrand applied this theory to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, that designers became more aware of, and interested in, this theory. One reason for this interest is that Hildebrand expanded the theory to add several additional spatial dimensions to the concept of prospect, including a love of complexity, exploration and opportunity. Hildebrand identifies that prospect and refuge may result intuitively in the work of an architect who seeks to control the manner in which open and bright spaces are framed spatially. He also applied a variation of the theory to analyse ceiling heights, the size of terraces, and the spatial complexity of a design.
Evidence for prospect-refuge theory: a meta-analysis of the findings of environmental preference research
Annemarie S. Dosen & Michael J. Ostwald, City, Territory, and Architecture 3, Article 4
The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the results of quantitative research which has been undertaken into the veracity of prospect-refuge theory and closely associated aspects of environmental preference theory. This meta-analysis not only involves a review of the results, but also their broad classification to develop a more holistic picture of the field, its findings and any gaps. The purpose of this process is not, explicitly at least, to assess the believability or rigour of this past research, but rather to examine and classify the findings, both for and against prospect-refuge theory, in a way that is useful for the design disciplines.