Proceedings of the 11 th Space Syntax Symposium SPATIAL SCHEMATA IN MUSEUM FLOORPLANS 35.1 #35 SPATIAL SCHEMATA IN MUSEUM FLOORPLANS JULIE BRAND ZOOK Texas Tech University, Lubbock, United States of America julie.zook@ttu.edu ABSTRACT The study introduces a method for a novel representational technique for spatial and visibility conditions that promotes the identifcation of categories of spatial experience, here for museum plans. This representation of spatial experience is built atop approaches from schema theory, which seeks to create models to represent mental categories that arise from continuous sensory-motor experience. Several schema are identifed for the experience of museum space using clusters of syntax metrics as evaluated using Visibility Graph Analysis. KEYWORDS Space syntax, cognition, museum, experience, schema 1. SCHEMA Sets of architectural representations often include both images that capture the overall organization of space (through orthographic drawings and diagrams) and images that capture specifc moments of situated experience (through perspective drawings, renderings, and photographs). These representation types are manifestly useful to central activities in architectural practice, such as evaluating design proposals, providing an informational basis for technical solutions, and communicating with clients, builders, and critics. However, common forms of architectural representation neglect what might be called the middle scale, which is neither as gross as the overall organization of building form nor as fne as the individual percept or detail. This paper is aimed at using Visibility Graph Analysis data to represent such a middle: namely, the dimensions of architectural form that exist but often go undescribed, that are real but open-ended, that are patternly but varied in form. Rafael Moneo and Aldo Rossi both propound the idea of the obscure as a key dimension of architectural type. In Rossi’s account, type is a pre-existing principle, but not a specifc form. For Moneo, type has a generative potential that arises from the capacity of refnements and combinations of formal structures to produce great relational richness. In his 1978 essay on type, Moneo distinguished between Quatremère de Quincy’s development of type, as restating primordial links to nature and history without providing models for form, and that of J.N.L. Durand, for whom type could be boiled down to a compendium of overt formal models meant to assist the newly professionalized architect in dealing with a proliferation of building functions. Moneo, acute to the Modernist rejection of type, recognized the modernist project of “form-space” (32) as calling attention to the conceptual dimension of space itself through the architectural qualities of buildings. Mies, at IIT, is his exemplar. Moneo’s description of form-space is interesting as an instance of a moment when the sensory experience of space is organized into something that can be recognized as a concept, category, or scheme. Schemata are useful for describing such emergent categories. Shema theory originates in Kantian philosophy on the productive imagination (1998/1781, 240) and is concerned with conceptual knowledge and how it is represented and used. From the point of view of learning and psychology, schema refers to cognitive building blocks that are vital to