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Shape Grammar



The Shape Grammar formalism, developed in the 1970's by George Stiny and James Gips, was inspired by the rewrite grammars of Chomskyan formal language theory. It differs from classical rewrite grammars in two respects:
(1) The distinction between terminal and non-terminal symbols is abolished. The symbols that are rewritten are the same symbols that occur in the final design.
(2) It is claimed that the symbols that are rewritten are geometrical entities (for instance: line segments) rather than discrete symbols that represent such entities.

The earliest Shape Grammars worked with line segments, but extensions were developed that deal with color and with three-dimensional shape.

     




References

C. Carlson, R. McKelvey and R. Woodbury: "An introduction to structures and structure grammars," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 18 (1991), pp. 417-426.

J. Gips: Shape Grammars and their Uses. Basel: Birkhauser, 1975.

Terry Knight's Shape Grammar Site

T. W. Knight: "Color grammars: designing with lines and colors," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 16 (1989), pp. 417-449.

T. W. Knight: "Designing with Grammars". In: G. N. Schmitt (ed.): Computer-Aided Architectural Design. Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1992, pp. 33-48.

T. W. Knight: "Color Grammars: the Representation of Form and Color in Design," Leonardo 26 (1993), pp. 117-124

T. W. Knight: "Shape grammars and color grammars in design," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 21 (1994), pp. 705-735.

T. W. Knight: "Designing a Shape Grammar". In: J. S. Gero & F. Sudweeks (eds.): Artificial Intelligence in Design Ô98. Kluwer, 1998, p. 514.

T. W. Knight: "Shape grammars: six types," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26 (1999), pp. 15-31.

R.G. Lauzzana & L. Pocock-Williams: "A Rule System for Aesthetic Research in the Visual Arts," Leonardo 21, No. 4 (1988).

G. Stiny: Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape and Shape Grammars. Basel: Birkhauser, 1975.

G. Stiny & J. Gips: "Shape Grammars and the Generative Specification of Painting and Sculpture". In: C. V. Freiman (ed.): Information Processing 71. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1972, pp. 1460-1465.

G. Stiny & J. Gips: Algorithmic Aesthetics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978.

G. Stiny: "Two exercises in formal composition," Environment and Planning B 3 (1976), pp. 187-210.

G. Stiny: "Introduction to Shape and Shape Grammars," Environment and Planning B 7 (1980).

G. Stiny: "Kindergarten grammars: designing with Froebel's building gifts," Environment and Planning B 7 (1980), pp. 409-462.
M. Tapia: From Shape to Style. Shape Grammars: Issues in Representation and Computation, PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (1996).

M. Tapia: "A visual implementation of a shape grammar system," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26 (1999), pp. 59-73.



Style simulation with Shape Grammars

Joan L. Kirsch & Russell A. Kirsch: "The Structure of Paintings: Formal Grammar and Design," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 13 (1986), pp. 163-176.

Joan Kirsch, Russell Kirsch & Sanford Ressler: "Computers Viewing Artists at Work," Proceedings of Syntactic and Structural Pattern Recognition, March, 1987.

Joan L. Kirsch & Russell A. Kirsch: "The Anatomy of Painting Style: Description with Computer Rules", Leonardo, Vol. 21, No 4 (December 1988).

Joan L. Kirsch & Russell A. Kirsch: "Storing art images in intelligent computers", Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Electronic Art, Netherlands, September 1988, published as Leonardo, Electronic Art Supplemental Issue, pp. 47-54, 1988, and also as Leonardo, Vol 23, No 1, (1990), pp. 99-106. [Simulations of Diebenkorn and Miró.]

Joan L. Kirsch & Russell A. Kirsch: "Computer grammars for the syntactical analysis of paintings", in I. Lavin (ed.) World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity, Acts of the 26th International Congress of the History of Art, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1989.

Russell A. Kirsch: "The History of Art History in the 21st Century, as Viewed from Computer Science: 20-20 Hindsight from the Year of the Same Name," Visual Resources, Vol VI, 1990, pp. 267-278.

Russell A. Kirsch: "Using Computers to Describe Style," In: Steven M. Freers (ed.): American Indian Rock Art, Vol 22 (1998), pp. 153-160.

T. W. Knight, "The generation of Hepplewhite-style chair back designs," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 7 (1980): 227-238.

T. W. Knight, "Transformations of the Meander Motif on Greek Geometric Pottery," Design Computing 1 (1986): 29-67.

 


Shape Grammars for style simulation in architecture.

H. Buelinckx: "Wren's language of City church designs: a formal generative classification," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 20 (1993), pp. 645-676.

S.-C. Chiou & R. Krishnamurti: "The grammar of Taiwanese traditional vernacular dwellings," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 22 (1995), pp. 689-720.

F. Downing & U. Flemming: "The bungalows of Buffalo," Environment and Planning B: 8 (1981), pp. 269- 293.

José Duarte: Shape Grammar for Álvaro Siza's patio houses in Malagueira. Ph. D. Thesis Project, MIT.

U. Flemming: "More than the sum of its parts: the grammar of Queen Anne houses," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 14 (1987), pp. 323-350.

U. Flemming: "Syntactic Structures in Architecture". In: M. McCullough, W. J. Mitchell & P. Purcell (eds.): The Electronic Design Studio. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 31-47.

N. L. R. Hanson & A. D. Radford: "On Modelling the Work of the Architect Glenn Murcutt," Design Computing (1986), pp. 189-203.

H. Koning & J. Eizenburg: "The Language of the Prairie: Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 8 (1981).

A. I. Li: "A 12th century Chinese building manual: descriptions and a shape grammar," Thresholds 17 (1998), pp. 25-30.

A. I. Li: "Expressing Parametric Dependence in Shape Grammars, with an Example from Traditional Chinese Architecture," Proceedings of the fourth conference of the Association of Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Shanghai (1999), pp. 265-274.

L. March: "Rulebound unruliness," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 23 (1996), p. 396.

L. March: "Architectonics of proportion: a shape grammatical depiction of classical theory," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26 (1999), pp. 91-100.

J. Rollo: "Triangle and t-square: the windows of Frank Lloyd Wright," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 22 (1995), pp. 75-92.

S G. Stiny: "Ice-ray: a note on Chinese lattice designs," Environment and Planning B 4 (1977), pp. 89-98.

G. Stiny & W. J. Mitchell, "The Palladian grammar," Environment and Planning B 5 (1978), pp. 5-18.

G. Stiny & W. J. Mitchell, "The grammar of paradise: on the generation of Mughul gardens," Environment and Planning B 7 (1980), pp. 209-226.

Y. Wang & J. P. Duarte: "Synthesizing 3D forms: shape grammars and rapid prototyping," Workshop on Generative Design, Artificial Intelligence in Design '98 Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, 1998, pp. 7-18.