Conceptual Engawa: The Experience of Ring-Based Circulation in Tadao Ando Museums

Abstract

Spatial ring structures play a prominent role in creating route choices in buildings. Ring structures are explored as a prevalent theme in the museum designs of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando by analysing their spatial configurations with the space syntax tool of justified graphs. The study shows that the traditional edge-based ringiness measures of space-link ratio and convex ringiness are not adequate to fully evaluate the key properties of ring structures that have emerged: Composition ringiness, connectivity ringiness, and complexity ringiness. New ring-based measures—d-ness, transcyclomatic number, and ring-island ratio—are introduced to assess the ringiness characteristics of the Ando museums. Drawing further on graph theory, second-order graphs are used to analyse the transring combinations in the spatial configurations of the more complicated museum layouts.