According to Bartlett's website, Space Syntax is "the only 5* rated architecture-based research group in the UK." Originally conceived by Professor Bill Hillier and his colleagues at The Bartlett, UCL in the 1980s as a tool to help architects simulate the likely effects of their designs, Space Syntax has since grown to become a tool used around the world in a variety of research and areas and design applications. Essentially it is a set of techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations of all kinds, especially where spatial configuration seems to be a significant aspect of human affairs, as it is in buildings and cities. It has been extensively applied in the fields of architecture, urban design, planning, transportation and interior design. Over the past decade, space syntax techniques have also been used for research in fields as diverse as archaeology, information technology, urban and human geography, and anthropology.
Their techniques however have recently come under scrutiny because of a number of paradoxes that arise under certain geometric configurations. These paradoxes have been highlighted by Carlo Ratti at the MIT, in an academic debate with Bill Hiller and Alan Penn. There have also been moves to return to combine space syntax with more traditional transport engineering models, using intersections as nodes and constructing visibility graphs to link them by various researchers, including Bin Jiang, Valerio Cutini and Mike Batty.
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