Building forms and circulation patterns

Abstract

In recent work (Tabor, 1970; 1975; March and Steadman, 1971), spectra of building forms have been studied in terms of their circulation characteristics with respect to occupancy by single homogeneous organizations. In this paper the more realistic assumption is made that a building may well accommodate more than one organization, or a heterogeneous organization made up of departments with high within-departmert interaction and negligible between-department interaction measured in terms of trips. The paper is in five sections. Section 1 outlines an approximate permutational algorithm for arranging the departments within the building forms. Section 2 sets out seventeen distinct but related building forms and defines the circulation measurements to be examined. Section 3 describes the eleven schematic circulation patterns chosen for the experiment. Section 4 looks at the theoretical match between circulation patterns and building forms, finally section 5 employs the approximate permutational algorithm to com...