Revealing Siting Patterns in Design Studio: An Architectural Reading with Cohort-Scale Visual Analytics

Building placement strongly conditions performance, experience, and meaning in architecture and urban planning, yet siting rationales in design studio work are rarely made explicit or examined systematically. This post hoc, observational study analyzes 22 student proposals for a paddle school on a defended coastal headland in Cascais, Portugal, to reveal siting patterns and test convergence toward an expert recommendation. Each project is mapped onto a common grid and encoded as building mass and external paths, and a site-specific expert prior is formalized as a polygon that follows the defended wall and upper terrace, combining edge protection, elevation, and ocean prospect. Alignment with this prior is assessed using exact permutation tests under uniform and elevation-stratified random siting, and each proposal is summarized by three descriptors that capture where mass concentrates, how far it extends, and how broadly it uses the site. Results show a pronounced nucleus along the upper terrace, a contour-parallel circulation spine, and extensive underused areas elsewhere, with alignment to the expert prior significantly above chance. Clustering projects by the three descriptors differentiates siting families, from edge-anchored schemes to prospect-led variants and a small set of deliberate counterexamples. The framework turns studio designs into auditable evidence of how cohorts occupy a site and makes siting heuristics explicit and testable, supporting more transparent discussion of site strategies in architectural education and informing practice-oriented design guidance.