PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SPATIALITY

Abstract

The design of space and its evaluation can be examined from the way space is perceived and from its memory production potential. Such psychological notions of spatiality, which primarily concern the perceived and experienced aspect, are most often drawn from the first children's spatial conceptualizations. Analyzing preverbal and precultural spatial representations of children on the one hand, and contemporary architectural practice on the other, this paper sets as its theme groups of qualitative values that are psychologically established through interaction between users and the space they inhabit. In this way, concepts such as place, sensory experience, and subconscious experience are directly associated with qualitative values such as domestic, sensory, and affective comfort. The aim of this paper is to form a methodological pattern of architectonic structure of comfort, within which values of lower order of associated parameters are established, explained by concepts such as integrity, temporality, grounding, sensory potential, haptic qualities, immediacy, and identification, as well as spatial indicators and architectural elements that incite and produce complex psychological connections with space. As a result, the presented techniques and operational tools for evaluating the psychological aspect of spatiality can serve as a methodology for evaluation and improvement of existing spaces, but also as a method for designing new higher quality spaces, that would build more complex psychological connections between user and
environment.