A Statistical Examination of Visual Depth in Building Elevations

Old buildings may be easier to read than modern buildings because they possess visual depth. This is the finding of an experiment that analysed building elevations and newspapers looking for a connection between their character and the size – frequency distribution of their component parts. It was found that drawings of older buildings sometimes displayed 1/f scaling and thus resembled natural scenes, but that this was rarely the case for modern buildings. The same distribution was also found in newspaper pages. We hypothesise that this distribution allows buildings to appear interesting and changeful when approached from afar in the same way that it makes newspapers easy to read over a range of distances, on a newsstand, over a shoulder, and so forth.