The Effect of Floorplate Shape upon Office Layout Integration

Two measures of floorplate shape, a measure of universal metric distance and a measure of convex fragmentation, are developed to study the effect of building shells upon the spatial structure of office layouts. Layouts are represented according to the fewest-lines map typically used in syntactic studies, with particular emphasis upon integration, a measure of the minimum directional distance from each line to all others. Integration is of special interest because previous case studies indicate that it has important effects upon space use, behaviors, and organizational functions. The study is not limited to examining how actual layouts relate to actual shells, because of the variety of programmatic and contextual factors that most likely influence such a relationship. To control for other variables, the effect of floorplate shape is assessed by inserting consistently generated theoretical layouts into theoretical, as well as actual, floorplates. The study concludes by showing that the integration of unbiased grids and fishbone layouts is affected by floorplate shape in opposite ways. Thus, the interaction between the spatial structure of layouts and the characteristics of shape is mediated by the principles used to generate the layouts. These findings can be used to evaluate building portfolios. They can also help designers to implement particular organizational programs by working around the constraints imposed by the floorplate shapes.