An Index for Measuring Aesthetic Perception of Shopping Building Frontages

Architects treat building frontages with careful attention to aesthetic detail. The ability of a building’s frontage to draw attention is directly proportional to its aesthetic perception resulting from the composition of its constituent physical features. While deciding on the building’s aesthetics is the architect’s prerogative, a question arises as to on what basis can an architect compare various conceptual designs and decide on the best option, considering the building users’ “likeability” factor. Aesthetic perception ratings and rankings from 206 regular shoppers were elicited. Further, 52 architects were asked to evaluate the aesthetics of these ranked shopping buildings. Combining Architects’ Gestalt indices with Birkhoff’s aesthetic measures as well as ranking weightages given by the public, a frontage aesthetic perception index of likeability—FAPIL, is proposed as an indexical aid for design decision making by architects. The findings were elicited by giving due consideration to building users’ as well as architect’s judgement so that they can be embodied into the design under conceptualization. Given site and cost constraints faced by the architect, the architect needs to ensure that the aesthetic features contributing to visual order be at least 2.3 times those that contribute to visual complexity for positive aesthetic perception of a shopping building.