Conclusion

Introduction

The content of this book is concerned with two significant computational theories, Shape Grammar and Space Syntax, which have been separately developed but rarely combined in any significant way. The first of these is typically used to investigate or generate the formal or geometric properties of architecture, while the second is used to analyse the spatial, topological or social properties of architecture. Despite the reciprocal relationship between form and space in architecture – it is difficult to conceptualise a completed building without a sense of both of these properties – the two major computational theories have been largely developed and applied in isolation from each another.

This book is the first to take a consistent approach to explaining the application and limits of both theories and trace emerging research in each. However, the book’s purpose is not just to explain these theories or propose methodological advances in each. Instead, this book demonstrates the first detailed, combined grammatical and syntactical computational method. This new combined method can be used to analyse an architectural language or style in terms of its combined formal and spatial properties. It can also be used to support the generation of new instances of a style that are compliant with both the formal and spatial properties of the original language. In essence, this new combined method reconnects form and space, or firmness and commodity in a Vitruvian sense, in architectural computational analysis. This concluding chapter briefly revisits the content of the book, including both grammatical and syntactical approaches and emerging trends and developments. Thereafter, it reiterates the primary frameworks and limitations of the new combined method.