Because advocacy planning and use of design guidelines are so prevalent, it is becoming important to ascertain how well each method can predict environmental quality. This article describes two experiments, covering 59 respondents and 76 environmental scenes, in which preferences of neighborhood groups and an architect's group were compared to each other, to responses of a random sample of a city's population, and to predictions based on design attributes of entourage, building interest, and building dominance. Results from both studies indicated that the attributes of building interest predicted the most preference variation. These findings suggest that the design guidelines' approach to visual amenity might be more efficacious than the advocacy approach.
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