Athanassios Economou and Thomas Grasl
2018

Keywords: Palladio; Shape grammars; Grammar Interpreter; Formal languages

The subject matter of the study is the Palladian language and especially the language of the Palladian villas as it has proposed by Stiny and Mitchell (1978a) and automated by Grasl and Economou (2014). The goal of the study is to show how a complex design language (sets of designs) can be captured and constructed in a shape grammar interpreter. The output of the computation here is the automated pictorial enumeration of a number of Palladian villas encoded in the Grape software. All designs are based on the complete catalogue of the Palladian partis on the 5 x 3 cell-size (Stiny and Mitchell, 1978b). Clearly for any parti there are several proportional schemes that can apply to it and for any of these proportional schemes there are several architectural designs that can be generated with respect to specific architectural elements used in the production, namely, porticoes, loggias, wall inflections, colonnades and so forth. Out of all these possible designs, only one is chosen here to instantiate each underlying parti.

Heather Ligler and Athanassios Economou
2018

Keywords: John Portman; Design automation; Shape grammar interpreter; Shape machine

The shape grammar formalism provides a robust framework to try ideas in analysis and synthesis in design. Still what might work in paper does not necessarily work in a shape grammar interpreter. if a computation fails, it is clear who is to blame? Did the user of the grammar follow rightly all the rules when she attempted to make a production of her own? Did she erase the labels properly? Did she apply the rules in all possible parts before she would move one to the next stage? If a mistake happens, is it in the designer’s side? Is it in the publisher’s side? Is it on the reader’s side? And so on. A most satisfying effort, and a great lesson to learn for everyone involved, but error prone too.

This work here takes on a given paper grammar that formalizes basic compositional moves in Portman's practice and puts them in action within the shape machine, the shape grammar interpreter currently developed in SCL. Interestingly, the expressiveness of the new medium not only checks and spellchecks the thesis as its was expressed in the original paper but it transforms it too. A visual catalogue of several possible designs is mechanically produced in the shape machine software to test the expressiveness of the grammar for a variety of n x m cell configurations. The term "Portmino villas" is assigned to the series to refer to Portman's inverse of Corbusier's villa Domino.

Nirvik Saha, Dennis Shelden and Athanassios Economou
2017

Keywords: Mughal garden; Shape grammars; Grammar Interpreter; Formal languages

The original Mughal garden grammar (Stiny and Mitchell, 1978) still remains one of the most enduring examples of the visual precision and generative power of shape grammars and since then it has been routinely referenced as an exemplary work in the shape grammar discourse and its applications in landscape design. The original Mughal garden grammar ended up with the image of an elder Shan Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, deposed and imprisoned in the Red Fort at Agra by his son Aurangzib, looking out from his pavilion in the fort, and dreaming of the char-baghs that might have been. The conviction of the authors was clearly that the grammar specified in their work enabled such dreams of char-baghs to be dreamed again by all the readers who were presented with the rules of the grammar; A poetic excursion indeed but enabling too because there is no better way to dream figuratively or literally but to play constructively with things and ideas of all sorts. This work picks up exactly where the original grammar ended and provides a computational application to implement and enable the play with the rules spelled out in the original shape grammar and the trial of possibilities that cannot be seen unless they are worked out – including the ones that are already dreamt and built by their original authors as well as others, potentially new, allowed within the rules of the game. The implementation of the rules does not follow one-to-one the rules as explicitly discussed in the grammar but instead it consolidates them in a parametric schema that consists of variables and combinations of sets of variables and is instantiated when values are assigned to these variables. This bundling of the rules in a parametric modeler is attempted here to take advantage of existing computational packages in Rhino /Python and shift the interest this in the automated production of designs and their possible extensions in other domains.

James Park and Athanassios Economou
2018

Keywords: Mies van der Rohe, Courthouse design, Generative description, Shape grammar, Ring schema

The ring typology provides the most essential morphological characteristic of all contemporary courthouses in the United States (US) and abroad. From its genesis at Waterhouse’s revolutionary rethinking of the courthouse building type in the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom to its formal consolidation in Mies Van der Rohe’s pristine Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse (Dirksen Courthouse) in the early 1960s in the US, the ring has emerged as the most significant morphological element that organizes the functions and defines the form of the building type. The work presented here takes on the architectonic arrangement of the ring especially as it was deployed generatively over several iterations in the office of Mies producing a seemingly inexhaustible variations of courtroom plate. A generative description of Mies’s courthouse design language is presented in the form of a three-dimensional parametric shape grammar and its significance in the discourse of courthouse building type is discussed.

Nirvik Saha, Dennis Shelden and Athanassios Economou
2017

Keywords: Mughal garden; Shape grammars; Grammar Interpreter; Formal languages

The original Mughal garden grammar (Stiny and Mitchell, 1978) still remains one of the most enduring examples of the visual precision and generative power of shape grammars and since then it has been routinely referenced as an exemplary work in the shape grammar discourse and its applications in landscape design. The original Mughal garden grammar ended up with the image of an elder Shan Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, deposed and imprisoned in the Red Fort at Agra by his son Aurangzib, looking out from his pavilion in the fort, and dreaming of the char-baghs that might have been. The conviction of the authors was clearly that the grammar specified in their work enabled such dreams of char-baghs to be dreamed again by all the readers who were presented with the rules of the grammar; A poetic excursion indeed but enabling too because there is no better way to dream figuratively or literally but to play constructively with things and ideas of all sorts. This work picks up exactly where the original grammar ended and provides a computational application to implement and enable the play with the rules spelled out in the original shape grammar and the trial of possibilities that cannot be seen unless they are worked out – including the ones that are already dreamt and built by their original authors as well as others, potentially new, allowed within the rules of the game. The implementation of the rules does not follow one-to-one the rules as explicitly discussed in the grammar but instead it consolidates them in a parametric schema that consists of variables and combinations of sets of variables and is instantiated when values are assigned to these variables. This bundling of the rules in a parametric modeler is attempted here to take advantage of existing computational packages in Rhino /Python and shift the interest this in the automated production of designs and their possible extensions in other domains.

Hayri Dortdivanlioglu and Athanassios Economou
2018

Keywords: Shape grammars; Generative design; Architectural language; Type and style; Italian rationalism

In 1991, the Yale exhibition ‘Giuseppe Terragni: Two Projects’, coupled two unbuilt projects by Terragni, the lesser known Mambretti Tomb and the well-known Danteum in the same architectural setting to foreground the architect’s formal language and reflect upon his possible motives and intentions. The two projects shared many commonalities: they were both unbuilt; they were both designed during the later mature career of the architect; they were both amply documented and developed allowing for an in-depth analysis; they both foregrounded a commemorative and symbolically laden program; and significantly, as the curators of the exhibition wrote, both exemplified “a personally imposed agenda which informs, indeed drives, these works”.

This work here takes on the same two unbuilt projects by Terragni to reflect upon the exhibition, test its outcome and claims, offer alternative methods to foreground the principles and the logic upon which such claims can be made, and ultimately suggest a new interpretation of the work. More precisely, the work here provides a formal specification of the Mambretti Tomb and the Danteum in the form of two parametric shape grammars that can be used to reconstruct them. Contrary to the formal analysis of the exhibition that concentrates on the relation between form and symbolism using underlying schemata of specific proportional shapes and spatial relations, this work defines specific visual rules for each project that when taken together foreground explicit similarities and differences between the two projects and suggest logical inferences and constructions between both. More broadly, this work aims at uncovering systematic deep structures behind both projects in order to gain a better insight in the ways formal vocabularies and spatial relations within Terragni’s work express the architect’s constructive deployment and transformation of compositional principles of neoclassicism and modernism.

Heather Ligler and Athanassios Economou
2016

Keywords: John Portman; Formal specification of architectural style; Shape grammars; Isovists

John Portman’s work attracts significant commentary, although the focus is typically on the commercial and social aspects of his work as opposed to the actual designs and their related architectural implications. The obvious place to start unpacking this aspect of his contribution is in his widely recognized and published commercial portfolio, yet throughout his life he maintained that his design principles are to be found in his personal domestic projects. More precisely, he describes his 1964 residence Entelechy I as a crucial project for the ongoing definition of his work, claiming that “It was in my house that I first began to experiment with the concepts that I had identified as constant elements in the way that people related to their environment. Perhaps I am the only one who can see it, but much of my later work is implicit in that house. It contains the basis for my architectural philosophy: organizing principles that work for a room or a restaurant, a building or a group of buildings “ [Portman and Barnett, 1976].

This notion of the house as generator is the subject of this research, which aims to unpack the house as a productive construct that can shed new light on Portman’s architectural language, its instances, and influences. This project looks closely at the house to provide: a formal analysis of the house outlining its key features and relations and a parametric shape grammar that generates the original design as well as a series of variations.

Cole Loomis and Athanassios Economou
2012

Keywords: Typological descriptions; Formal analysis; Shape grammars; Courthouses;

CourtroomsThe underlying morphology of contemporary courthouses depends heavily on the spatial relations between the three independent networks, namely the public, the restricted and the secure networks, and the ways they all connect to each one of the courtrooms in the building. The rising complexity is addressed here through the design of three-dimensional formal game consisting of three-dimensional blocks in the shape of rooms and corridors. The specific dimensioning of these shapes recalls the proportions of the Froebel blocks and specifically those of the oblong for the courtrooms and the pillar for the corridors to suggest a fundamental basis for the design strategy. The ways that the pillars and the oblongs relate one to another produce sectional inverted T-arrangements of courtrooms to suggest the possibility of a truly three-dimensional weaving of the networks one to another. The proposed grammar is able to capture the simple built forms of several of the courthouses in the corpus and its extension to sectional stacked corridors within the same height of the enclosed courtrooms allows for a variety of novel forms too.

Yi He and Athanassios Economou
2012

Keywords: Typological descriptions; Formal analysis; Shape grammars; Courthouses; Courtrooms

An inquiry on the formal generation of contemporary courtrooms and courtroom-aggregations based on existing project designed by eponymous architectural firms including Morphosis Architects; Safdie architects; Richard Meier Architects; and Scogin and Elam Architects. Details about the secure network of all these courtrooms are conjectured as long as the actual data regarding these parts of the courthouses are not generally available to public. All the courtrooms are represented in an identical manner using similar conventions of wall configuration, programmatic adjacencies, entry sequences, lighting conditions and so forth. Each courtroom is captured by a grammar that can produce more courtrooms in the same language too and all grammars can be combined in a variety of ways to produce new and interesting examples of hybrid designs. Similarly all grammars are extended to capture the ways courtrooms combine to produce courtroom aggregations, the core of courthouses, and significantly, all these grammars combine too. Two productions of the grammar– one to reproduce the original one (and verify the theory – the grammar) and another to produce a new diagrammatic representation are given for each language. The derivation of all designs is fully executed in an automated way in a shape grammar interpreter (Grasl and Economou, 2013).

Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou
2006

Keywords: Smith House; Symmetry; Group Theory; Diagrams; Partial order

The 1967 Exhibition New York Five (NY5) on the work of five New York City architects, namely Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier, and the subsequent book Five Architects published in 1972, have indelibly stamped the course of the history of modern architecture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Among this early work of NY5 the Meier's buildings were closer from all on the modernist aesthetic of the Corbusian form and in fact even the later buildings that Meier produced since then have all remained truest to this aesthetic. This work traces the history and logic of the evolution of Meier’s early language and its direct relationships to spatial and formal investigations of early-twentieth-century modernism as well as its direct reciprocal relationships with the rest of the NY5 languages. The departure for this inquiry of such centrifugal relationships between representation and formal analysis for the purposes of this work is Richard Meier’s Smith House, an early pivotal work, an acknowledged forerunner and embodiment of the full repertory of Meier formal strategies and language.