A Combined Grammatical and Syntactical Method

Introduction

This chapter explains and demonstrates a grammatically interpolated and syntactically derived method for architectural design analysis and generation. The first of the two approaches, the grammatical, is associated with the logical relationships that exist between elements (Stiny & Gips, 1972). In architecture, this usually refers to the form-generating rules that describe the two or three-dimensional shape of a building. The second of the approaches, the syntactical, focuses on spatial relations that may in turn be mapped to various functional considerations (Hillier & Hanson, 1984), leading to its use to describe the functional structure of space. Applications of the two approaches – Shape Grammar and Space Syntax – are similarly diverse. Fundamentally, in its conventional architectural use, the former develops a set of rules to describe or generate a corpus of designs (form), while the latter is used to investigate spatial topologies and social relations (function). This combination is significant, as traditionally architecture has been defined, at least in part, as being made up of form and function, which, when combined in the right way, achieves a level of poetic or aesthetic appeal. Early twentieth century Modernist architects even argued that form necessarily follows function, although subsequent architectural movements challenged this simple, if powerful, proposition. Because of the importance of form and function in architecture, and the fact that their relationship has often been viewed as reciprocal (form shapes function, and in turn, function shapes form), it is natural that grammatical and syntactical approaches would be conceptualised as potentially offering a powerful analytical combination. Nonetheless, despite some isolated attempts, they have rarely been successfully combined to consider both the grammatical and syntactical features of architecture.

Several past studies (Eloy, 2012; Heitor, Duarte, & Pinto, 2004; March, 2002) have proposed combining the strengths of both Shape Grammar and Space Syntax approaches. Such works have typically connected the insights developed separately in these fields, and have tended to generate design instances using a grammatical process and then evaluated them using graph theory. Thus, in such examples, a Space Syntax technique is used to decide which applications of the grammatical rules are most valuable in the set of design productions. By developing shape as the starting point, this particular combined approach privileges form over function. In contrast, the combined grammatical and syntactical method introduced in the present chapter commences with a consideration of functional issues, identifying the syntactical properties of a design through a special type of Justified Plan Graph (JPG). By commencing with a JPG grammar in the first stage, the method is able to capture a variety of syntactical values in an architectural plan layout (Lee, Ostwald, & Gu, 2015a, 2018). After defining the spatial and syntactic relations implicit in a design, the method then derives a set of shape-based rules to illustrate the overall form of the design using a descriptive grammar, in this case called “a massing grammar” (Lee, Ostwald, & Gu, 2017). In this method, the configuration of functional spaces precedes the generation of forms, meaning that, conceptually, form follows function. While past research in architectural theory has demonstrated that form and function do not necessarily exist in such a fixed relationship, in general, for both practical and aesthetic reasons, functional thinking tends to precede formal resolution in the classical design process and in much architectural practice.