Architectural, indoor environmental, personal and cultural influences on students’ selection of a preferred place to study

This paper aims to better understand the human inhabitation of buildings through an investigation of the influences of architectural order, indoor environmental as well as personal and cultural variables on student’s selection of a preferred place to study. The approach for this interdisciplinary inquiry is based on Integral Sustainable Design in combination with a simplified version of Integral Methodological Pluralism using methodologies from the disciplines of architectural design, architectural science and psychology. The results indicate that participant’s preferences emerged out of either personal or collective cultural narratives. The integral approach was useful to identify collective preference patterns as well as deviations from these and to understand why they occur. Important influences on participant’s selection of their preferred place to study were spatial characteristics, in particular a balance of prospect and refuge as well as individual past experiences, and the nature of the given task in this case study.