In 1949 Daniel Dye published his book A Grammar of Chinese lattice showcasing an influential catalogue of Chinese ornamental and grilled window designs ranging from the 10th c. to the 19th c. Some of the designs published in the book were reworked by George Stiny during the '70s in his paper Ice-ray: A note on the generation of Chinese lattice designs, to showcase his new theoretical method to approach design in terms of visual rules that apply recursively to generate designs.

This work takes on Stiny's grammar of an 18th c window design at Chengtu, Szechwan, one of the two rule-based compositional methods outlined in the paper, and puts it into practice as an introductory exercise in the shape grammar class at Georgia Tech. The grammar was implemented individually by each student using the shape machine, the shape grammar interpreter of SCL in Rhino, and transformed appropriately as needed. The deliverables of the study are a series of new designs implementing different motifs and compositional ideas to transform the rule 6 of the original grammar. Significantly, all different motifs tried by the students were drawn directly within the modeling environment of Rhino showcasing a truly visual programming environment for spatial design. Acknowledgments: We want to thank Nunggu Ahn, Zeinab Babalou, TJ Bogan, Yousef Bousehri, Warren Campbell, Vincent Chang, Alexander Clegg, Fatima Javeed, Zachary Lancaster, Andressa Martinez, Amelia Mclean, Eri Natsumi, Victoria Olaogun and Yuqin Zhong for their enthusiasm and hard work during the project.