The impact of glazed barriers on the visual and functional performance of transition spaces in college buildings using space syntax

Abstract

With the increased use of glazed barriers in interior design, glazing effect on users' perception has become an essential topic of several recent studies. Few numbers of these studies addressed the influence of glazing on transition spaces' performance. From this stand, the present study aims to examine the effects of glazing on transition spaces' performance in higher education buildings through adopting a space syntax methodology. The study follows a comparative analysis model using several syntactic measures, such as integration, choice, intelligibility, cluster coefficient, etc. The results showed that the glazing enhanced the functional performance by increasing visual accessibility and promoting smooth movement. While the axial analysis failed in tackling the full effect of glazing on functional performance of transition spaces. Furthermore, visibility analysis was effective in tracing the impact of glazing on both functional and visual performance, particularly the measures of the cluster coefficient, through vision and visual connectivity.