Architecture can be understood as deliberate elaborations of physical forms and configurations into socially and culturally meaningful objects, enabling activities and programmes as well as communicating ideas andvalues. It can be argued that part of this elaboration is that of staging, and that of the treatment of differences of visibility and permeability, which carries strong cultural and social connotations. However, this is often discussed either as singular situations of exposure or accessibility, or as compensatory use of one over the other, where visibility serves to compensate for accessibility, or provide a certain form of transpatiality. Studying structures of relations between visibility and permeability, however, leading to an understanding of emergent degrees of exposure and availability, seems to say a lot about architectural character and identity. This paper argues that a more thorough study of this relation is central to developing architectural morphology, and proposes a model for ‘building profiling’ that sets up an analysis of how the interrelation between visibility and accessibility can be used to inform architectural analysis of the identity of architectural structures as well as the way that identity of the content is described. This is done on the onehand elaborating on basic architectural morphologies commonly used within space syntax, but also compares to experimental works such as Autant’s Théâtre de l’espace from 1937 and everyday urban and architectural situations. The main line of argument is the change from individual situations to a system of syntactic, configurative relations which, it is argued, requires a degree of secondary abstraction – an abstraction that provides thorough understanding of certain architectural effects of configuration that contributes to the character and identity of buildings or urban spaces.

Detta paper undersöker systematiska skillnader mellan konfigurationer av visibilitet, tillgänglighet, och närhet som ett sätt att förstå på vilket sätt byggnader agerar till exempel iscensättande och åtskiljande på en systemnivå. Detta eftersom det starkt bidrar till kommunikation av identitet och värderingar både av användare, besökare, och byggnaderna i sig. För att göra det går studien via enkla principiella planlösningar för att se hur det utvecklar sig, och jämför de konfigurativa egenskaperna både direkt och genom att behandla de olika abstraktionerna i diagram som platsen för undersökningarna i sig.