JUDGMENTS OF HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURAL STYLES

Summary.4 groups of 22 Ss each, equally divided by sex, ranked or rated the complexity, preference, pleasingness, and ioterestingness of 7 pairs of outline drawings of buildings representing different architectural styles. In general. a linear rather than curvilinear relationship was found between the four measures; the sexes did not differ in their responses to architecture; and the extent to which reactions to the architectural examples differed depended on the task. The purpose of this study, whose larger framework is environmental psychology and psychological aesthetics, ws to ascertain the presence of a systematic relationship between architectural stimuli and four frequently used cognitive and affective judgmenrscomplexity, preference, pleasingness, and interest (Berlyne, 1971; Wohlwill, in press). Responses were obtained from four groups of 22 randomly selected undergraduate and experimentally naive volunteers, each equally divided by sex. One group rated the pleasingness of the stimuli, while rankings were obtained on the remaining three variables. Fourteen black and white outline drawings of the frontal elevation exteriors of single buildings were shown; these were representative of seven historical styles of diffcrent Western countries from the period 16 B.C. to 1607 A.D. (Roman, early Christian, Byzantine, Italian Romanesque, French Romanesque, Spanish Medieval, and German Renaissance). They had been photographed from a standard reference work, enlarged, and mounted. Except for the differences in style, the stimuli were otherwise equivalent (in size, perspective, amount of detail, etc.). Their simplicity, graphic similarity (cf. photos), and their relative unfamiliarity (cf. modern architecture) led to their choice. They are a realistic compromise between the needs for experimental control (cf. nonsense and artificial stimuli) and psychological meaningfulness (cf. naturalistic field studies; Lindauer. 1973). Pearson correlations between the four sets of responses (Table 1) indicate that there was a systematic relationship among measures and that these were more linear than curvilinear. Only the .SO correlation of complexity and pleasingness fell short of statistical significance, although just barely (p = .05). (Note that a rank of 1 and a rating of 7 are equivalent; hence the negative values on the pleasingness task.) The two instances in which curvilinearity was found-between complexity and pleasingness, and preference and pleasingness-partially or completely disappeared when the data were examined for each sex separately; see notes (Table 1) based on comparisons between linear and quadratic equations. As the degree of judged complexity increased for architectural styles representing 17 centuries of development, affective and cognitive reactions also increased regularly. None of the sets of responses was correlated with time (r 5 .40, p > .05). The responses to the stimuli differed from one another on each task (FUlm 2 2.43, p < .01). The extent of these differences varied with the cask, ranging from a high of 65% of the stimuli differing from one another on the complexity task to a low of