Temporal Wayfinding in Built Environments of Power: "Understanding" and "Exploration" in Villa Pisani and Villa Valmarana

This interdisciplinary qualitative study examines wayfinding in historically layered environments by extending the Preference Matrix (Kaplan et al., 1998, p.13) beyond its original spatial framework to include a temporal dimension. Integrating insights from Azaryahu and Foote (2008) on spatialized historical narratives, this study conceptualizes meaning as emerging from visitors’ present moment experience while walking through space, as perceptual understanding and exploration unfold in situ. Temporal change, by contrast, operates at the level of the environment, in the form of successive historical interventions that are encountered and interpreted as visitors move across space. Through a comparative analysis of Villa Pisani and Villa Valmarana ai Nani—two 18th-century villas, situated in the Veneto countryside and frescoed by the Tiepolos—this study investigates how power, design, and historical succession shape not only visitors’ movement through space but also their navigation of historical layers. Drawing on environmental psychology, historical reconstruction from secondary sources, iconography, site analysis, spatial syntax, and visual documentation, the study compares and contrasts how the preference matrix’s dimensions of understanding (characterized by legibility and coherence) and exploration (involving complexity and mystery) operate in built environments marked by historical discontinuity. While Kaplan et al. (1998) provided a cognitive affective framework for environmental experience, Azaryahu and Foote (2008) supplied a temporal narrative mechanism through which historical meanings are spatially configured and encountered. ‘Temporal wayfinding,’ as proposed here, emerges at the intersection of these complementary perspectives, capturing the dynamic interplay between spatial perception and historical interpretation in wayfinding.