From academic research on museum galleries to practice-based research for planning shopping malls

Abstract

This paper explores how findings obtained from case study research on museum gallery layouts provide insights for shopping mall planning and design. The case studies investigated the effects of gallery layouts on visitors' movement patterns in museums, drawing upon the Space Syntax methodology. In the case studies, the local visual cues are considered as important as global spatial structure, and the effects of spatial layout on pedestrian movement are investigated on the basis of both top-down and bottom-up characterizations of space. The case studies analyzed two exemplary museum gallery layouts, the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, CT) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). This exploration was able to explain the prediction of movement patterns by different visibility properties that shaped in morphological characteristics of these museums. In this study, understanding the impact of local visual information such as visual cues perceived in space aids understanding possible effects of attractors (i.e. popular displays) on movement. This paper argues that the results obtained from the museum case studies research can provide insights on how pedestrian movement is distributed with the effect of layout and attractors in shopping malls, and aid formulating further research on movement in shopping layouts. The two museum layouts analyzed can be illustrative of two types of shopping mall layouts. Our results suggest that type of shopping layout illustrated by YCBA may be more desirable for visitors as it facilitates encounters and offer clarity in grasping the layout, and the latter may be more advantageous for manipulating visitors with strategically placed attractors.