PurposeThis study aims to provide a method to assess the perceptual impact of the visual complexity of building façades.Design/methodology/approachThe research identifies the number of design elements and the variation in their position and colour as variables of visual complexity. It introduces the concepts of vertices and corners as atomic indicators on which the measurement of these variables is built. It measures visual complexity and its variables in images of building façades and analyses their relationships with participants' reactions. It reports on the effect of visual complexity on preferences, the adequacy of different methods in measuring visual complexity and the perceptual impact of each of its variables.FindingsThe research demonstrates that visual complexity can be assessed through the measure of its variables and their statistical mapping to users' preferences.Originality/valueThe manuscript provides the foundation for a planning/assessment tool for the visual control of the built environment using computer systems based on the preferences of residents through the examination of the relationship between the users and their environment. It creates a paradigm, which introduces a robust concept in the visual analysis of urban design.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the number of design elements in the context of building facades in urban streetscapes and visual preferences of users to enable a more meaningful citizen participation in the design of local streetscapes. Design/methodology/approach This paper developed a web application, which manages experiments through programmatically creating scenes and displaying them online to participants using questionnaires. It collects preferences towards the number of design elements in the scenes and determines the statistical relationship between them. Findings The results offer an empirical description of a semi-convex relationship between the number of elements and preferences. They confirm that participants from a particular area inter-subjectively agree in their visual judgements towards the number of design elements, and justify the employment of a regression model fitted on the preferences of residents to assess design proposal in their area. Originality/value The paper offers an empirical description of the relationships between preferences and a wide range of values of the number of design elements and empirically supports that people from one area inter-subjectively agree in their judgements towards a visual aspect of the building facades. The study introduces a new analytical component, known as the vertex, which could alter future methods on the visual evaluation of the built environment.

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