Syntactical and Mathematical Measures of Spatial Configuration

Abstract

This chapter presents a detailed explanation of the construction and analysis of a justified plan graph (JPG) of a building plan. It introduces the classic syntactical and mathematical measures derived from a JPG and discusses their interpretation in terms of the original architectural plan the results are derived from. Thereafter, an alternative weighted and directed JPG is introduced which uses four measures: centrality, degree centrality, centrality closeness, and betweenness. The mathematical measures introduced in this chapter are applied in Section 3 of this book to examine two syntactical and grammatical applications. Throughout the present chapter, three “Palladian” villas—Villa Saraceno, Villa Sepulveda, and Villa Poiana—are used as examples to explain and demonstrate the concepts.