The Visualisation of the Urban "Ambient" Parameters

Abstract

For many years architectural and urban ambience, a topic included in environmental design studies, has been the focus of extensive interdisciplinary research in physical and social science laboratories. Urban and architectural spaces, in interaction with environmental parameters such as light and sound, generate environmental entities called "ambients". This notion places the human being back in the centre of space analyses. With regard to classical models of ambience representation, the rule of scale and human interaction allows us to define this notion of ambients through the immersion principle, integrating relevant perceptive parameters in the architectural and urban ambience research fields. This approach aims to integrate the main subjective aspects of perception into the scientific knowledge of physical processes of urban environment. We place this approach in the context of emerging virtual technologies, where formal solutions can be tested in a multidimensional data set. This opens up the possibility of a global characterisation system, including space (urban data), process (environmental physics), and players (humans). The main goal of our work is to provide designers with tools in order to include thermal, aerodynamic, acoustic and lighting data in the urban design process.