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Surface Symmetries: The Smith House Revisited
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Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou
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International Journal of Architectural Computing
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10.1260/1478-0771.8.4.485
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Symmetry analysis, Formal analysis, Partial order, Richard Meier, Smith House
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This work proposes the use of partial order lattices along with representational schemes to account for patterns of ambiguity and emergence in the description of designs. The complexity of such designs is viewed as an aggregation of spatial layers that can all be decomposed by the subgroup relations of the symmetry of the configuration. The object of analysis is polemically chosen here to be the Smith House by Richard Meier, a design that clearly exemplifies formal qualities of late modernism architecture such as abstraction, layering, complexity, depth, collage and so on, all aesthetic categories appearing impenetrable to a systematic and rigorous analysis using existing group theoretical formal methods. The paper is divided into four sections: In the first section the introduction and motivation of the work are given. In the second section the formal model of notational representation and subsymmetry analysis is described in detail. In the third section an application of this methodology is given for the Smith House including visual computations capturing sub-symmetry relations for all parts of the house and a complete catalogue of recombination of all symmetry parts of the house. Lastly, in the fourth section the discussion is given on the degree to which the symmetry decompositions can support visually the established discourse on the house and the possibility of using such formal tools in CAD applications.
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