ABSTRACT
PATTERN RECOGNITION IS a basic human cognitive ability that allows us to make sense of the world, use known situations to understand unknown situations, and decrease our stress by filling in partial evidences to make complete wholes. It is a basic operation of human thinking that allows us not to have to examine (and re-examine) everything in our environment, over and over. Our natural inclination is to seek patterns and recognize them as an efficient way to understand the world and act in it. Patterns are a type of repetition that organizes a formal arrangement or experience as understandable by creating a configuration which we can recognize (see Repetition ). Once we understand something to be a pattern, we can easily predict what will happen next, where something might be located or how something might work. Patterns are extremely important in architecture because they are one of the basic operations of making and comprehending human environments. We find patterns at the core of understanding path and circulation, theories of proportion, form-to-activity relationships, recognition of importance, building typology (use-to-form relationships – see Type ), urban morphology and all ordering principles (see Axis , Centrality and Radiosity ).
