IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Portmeirion is widely understood as a picturesque and playful heritage environment, a carefully composed village designed by Clough Williams-Ellis to delight through scenic pleasure. Within this context, the presence of even limited visitor reported unease or disorientation is unexpected. While such responses are not dominant, their persistence raises a productive question: how can a landscape explicitly designed to be benign give rise to moments of perceptual discomfort? This investigation addresses this paradox by linking spatial configuration to predictive models of perception. Drawing on neuroscientific and ecological theories, it understands unease not as fear, but as a state arising when the environment prevents anticipation from resolving. When upcoming space cannot be reliably inferred, perceptual systems remain engaged in continuous monitoring, sustaining low level physiological arousal even in non threatening settings. To examine Portmeirion’s visual conditions, a three-dimensional model was utilized to simulate visual fields along a pedestrian route. Viewsheds were generated at eye level within a 30 m radius, which allowed for the calculation of occlusion rates indicating the extent of the environment that is not visible. The findings reveal high and unstable occlusion rates, resulting in frequent disruptions to visual continuity and spatial prediction. The paper concludes that the perceptual discomfort in Portmeirion is a predictable outcome of its spatial configurations, illustrating how computational visibility analysis can connect architectural design to perceptual experiences in landscapes. This paper fits within the Urban Planning & Landscape Architecture strand, examining how spatial configuration and movement through a designed landscape shape perceptual experience.