ABSTRACT
People respond to and interact with buildings. We form opinions about building function or how spaces feel to us, we reason about building layout or the intentions the architect might have had, and we may become confused (or even lost) in certain locations in a building that do not meet our expectations. This reciprocal humanenvironment interaction is a key topic of environmental psychology, which studies how people experience, behave in, and understand natural or built environments. This chapter invites you, the reader, to take a journey through different aspects and measurements of how building users, unfamiliar with the Seattle Public Central Library, experienced it. It presents the results of a post-occupancy evaluation that focused on the extent that users’ emotional and aesthetic responses to key locations corresponded with their associated spatial properties. Before we continue, we need to introduce two important theoretic ideas.
