The Role of Shape Grammars in the Analysis and Creation of Designs

The paper gives an informal introduction to the shape grammar formalism. It presents results form a case study in which this formalism was applied to a realistic problem in order to convey the flavor of work with such grammars, to demonstrate its advantages and to show that our familiarity with this formalism has now progressed to a level were issues of architectural substance can be addressed. The paper concludes with the outline of a simple way to implement shape grammars by computer: it does not resolve the theoretical problems that exist for such implementations, but makes non-trivial applications like the case study possibl