A Social Sci­ence of Archi­tec­ture:

As such, some sys­tem­atic data col­lec­tion could have a con­sid­er­able impact on this field. Do cor­ri­dors or suites make the fac­ulty and stu­dents pro­duce and learn more? Does ver­ti­cal cir­cu­la­tion work as well as hor­i­zon­tal? Should we put fac­ulty in close prox­im­ity to oth­ers work­ing on the same projects or should we max­i­mize inter­dis­ci­pli­nary adja­cen­cies? Which types of floor plans increase inter­ac­tion? Which types of inter­ac­tion pro­duce the most knowl­edge cre­ated, gen­er­ated, and pre­served? Do we want to build build­ings that encour­age doors to be kept open, so as to make the fac­ulty seem approach­able or should we try to keep doors closed so that they can get work done? In this field as in most oth­ers, a great deal can be learned by directly mea­sur­ing the rel­e­vant out­come vari­able; in archi­tec­ture, quite remark­ably, this has only rarely been attempted.