Riken Homma

Visual Impact Analysis and Control Method of Building Height for Landscape Preservation of the Traditional Gardens: A Case Study on the Suizenji Jōjuen in Kumamoto City

With the progress of urbanization,dlc the traditional gardens are increasingly visually destroyed by the construction of high-rise buildings around them. This study aims to evaluate the degree of landscape destruction caused by high-rise bulidings using visual impact analysis, and present a quantitative approach for controlling the height of buildings using GIS. This paper selected Suizenji Jōjuen, a traditional Japanese strolling garden located in Kumamoto City as a case study. Firstly, a 3D urban model was constructed. Then, three main view points were selected as observation points in order to simulate real vision of observers, and the contours of trees around the garden were described by the vertical and horizontal angles from each observation point. Secondly, the study focused on two visual impact factors: angle of elevation and distance, and used angle of elevation analysis to calculate and evaluate the degree of landscape destruction caused by buildings around garden. This analytical method was based on the height of buildings and the distance from observation points to buildings. Thirdly, a virtual vision plane was constructed, which was formed by a large amount of extension lines linking from observation points to the contours of trees. Based on the vision plane, a quantitative control method of building height was presented, and the height of buildings was limited according to the distance away from the center of the garden. This research, could not only contribute to the landscape preservation of Suizenji Jōjuen, but also suggest a quantitative approach for controlling the height of buildings for reference for the building height restrictions around traditional gardens in other cities.

Assessment of the Use of 3D- Viewing and Mark-up Tool for Rich Network Design Communication

Though there have been many successful examples of Virtual Design Studio, there still exist unsuccessful cases in which participants felt dissatisfied or even frustrated, especially at synchronous stages of design_communication. A discussion that required designers to refer to 3D models was one of the situations where technical support was insufficient to satisfy the expectation of designers. Assuming that an interactive viewing of 3D models and use of a mark-up utility on a shared PC window could enhance such design communications (though this also requires network bandwidth and computational power) the author conducted experiments in design discussion between two designers to test the capability and effects of these tools for network collaborations. This paper discusses the framework and results of the experiments, and proposes the next step for system developments.

ON THE EFFECT OF INTRODUCTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL WORK STAGE INTO THE PROBLEM SOLVING DISCUSSION

The aim of this paper is to test, through the experiment, that the result of problem solving discussion can be improved by introducing individual work stage in the beginning. The authors adopted “The Moon Survival Task” developed by NASA in United States to the experiment. The 30 minute experiment was carried out with two groups of three 3-student teams: teams that introduced 15 minutes individual work stage before 15 minute discussion (on-team) and those that made 30 minute discussion without individual work (off-team). The major findings can be summarized as follows;1) The on-team achieved more accurate team answer after the discussion compared with the off-team.2) The individual answer of on-teams, submitted after the discussion, also became much more accurate than those for off-teams.3) These differences in two groups are caused by the difference in the level of the consensus achieved through the discussion, though the length of discussion-time for on-team is only a half of that for off-team.