Abstract
This report, which examines the image of exterior house-form as expressed in words, deals with one portion of an opinion-survey using 76 exterior photographs of detached houses ; this opinion-survey was entitled "Image Research of Architecture". This part of the survey was done by requiring the respondents to write word responses to these questions : "What kind of architectural type do you imagine intuitionally from the photographs of each building, and what kinds of associations arise from your perception of its form ?" First, by directly summing up the data which were expressed for each building, we reached a general conclusion about how the form of buildings is grasped in words, and starting from the fact that among the responses for individual buildings we could observe many words in common, we examined each word to determine which buildings were described using that same word. Next, from a quantitative examination of the ways in which the same word had been adopted for different buildings, we determined the closeness of the relation between buildings and derived a correlation matrix (represented graphically), from which we extracted several groups of buildings. And then, adopting factor-analysis for the correlation matrix, we confirmed, as the most appropriate solution, a total of eight significant factors, from which we exrtacted eight types of exterior house-form. As the conclusion of this report, we clarified the relation between the individual building types and words by taking into account the factor scores of the eight types.
