Evaluating Visual Privacy in Urban Apartment Housing

Certain design decisions and features in apartment designs support visual privacy and enable quality views from dwellings, and new simulation tools are increasingly able to parameterize and quantify these aspects. For example, ClimateStudio, a plug-in for Rhino, has View Analysis as a performance criteria relating to the LEED rating systemís View Quality Credit in the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) category. View Quality is currently understudied in the context of apartment housing and there is a related area that needs investigating: visual privacy. There is a research gap relating to evaluating visual privacy and visual connectedness and it is especially relevant in urban apartment housing. This paper reports on a project that reviewed the literature on visual privacy and explored how it can be evaluated in multi-unit residential housing.