VISUAL COMFORT OF URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The article reveals the concept of a comfortable environment and the means to achieve it, in particular, by improving the aesthetic parameters of the environment, improving the functional and spatial structure of architectural and urban objects. The content of a new scientific direction of videoecology, initiated by the Russian scientist V.A. Filin, who builds his theory on the basis of saccade automation, is highlighted. In his works, Filin V.A. identifies such unfavorable for human life architectural spaces as aggressive and homogeneous ones, which lead to mental illness and increase the level of social pathology. Followers of Filin V.A. make attempts to quantify the "aggressiveness", the development of the coefficient of "aggressiveness" of such architectural fields. In contrast to these "saccadic" studies, this article offers an informational approach to determining the comfort of urban environment. It is based on the information theory of proportionality, and on the principle of the least action. Eisenko's empirical formula for beauty became the conceptual basis of the harmony indicator and comfort of architectural spaces, in particular facade compositions. The main parameters that determine the beauty are the complexity and orderliness of the object of evaluation. In the article, complexity is defined as the amount of visual information in the evaluated object, and orderliness (disorder) as the number of types of relationships of elements of the dimensional structure of the object.Using the principle of information discreteness and the principle of the least action, the authors of the study proposed a model for measuring the smallest number of information modules (blocks) in the total visual information of the object of evaluation by maximizing information modules. The formula for definition of a quantitative indicator of comfort of the city environment has been offered. The final part of the article discusses the possibility of computer harmonization and increase the comfort of the environment in the process of automated design. This is the prospect of further research.