Validity and Reliability of Ratings of Simulated Buildings

How does one represent a designed environment before it is built? What are the right questions to ask about such a representation? Real or proposed physical spaces are notoriously difficult to model or manipulate experimentally, not only because they are expensive and timeconsuming to construct but also because they are highly complex, their effect may be revealed only over extended time, and their connotations will vary with different kinds of self-selected users in variously-defined groups. This paper explains how, in a test of scales and simulations, the exteriors of four recently-constructed campus buildings were evaluated on five, 7-point labelled scales by two control groups (N=38 each) of subjects randomly selected from a pool of 304 naive adults.