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Spatial relationship in Gropius House. Color representation: green represents the living room, light red represents bedrooms, blue represents service space, and orange represents transitional space/corridors.
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The purpose of this study is to analyze William Hajjar’s single-family houses in State College, PA, and compare them with the European modernist work of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in the United States. This analysis is performed using shape grammars as a computational design methodology. Hajjar was a member of the architecture faculty at the...
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Shape grammar and space syntax 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 analyze the spatial, topological, or social properties of architecture. Despite the reciprocal relat...
Citations
... In the same year, Li analyzed the classical Chinese treatise Yingzao Fashi using shape grammar under Stiny's shape grammar system [33]. From 2019 to 2020, Hadighi and Duarte conducted shape grammar analysis on the works of some American and European architects, resulting in a series of contrasting shape grammar studies [34][35][36]. Amorim and Griz analyzed the layout of the architectural works of the Brazilian architect Amorim in the same year, analyzing the relationship between the connection patterns of the rooms in the apartment and the building site [37]. Mamoli made a detailed analysis of the layout plan of the ancient Greek and Roman library in terms of the building's function in 2020 and elaborated on the characteristics of the library layout [38]. ...
Architectural heritage in historic districts, as a complex type of heritage, encompasses both the uniqueness of the building itself and also shows cultural and regional characteristics as a group, especially for the heritage site that contains multi-culture features. The digitalization research of this type of heritage often focuses on the digital archiving and modeling of heritages but rarely considers the combination of culture analysis and digitalization. This paper develops a digital form generation method for the heritages in historical districts by means of typological plan analysis, the Shape Grammar method, and Grasshopper software. Based on the case study of the modern Western-style house on Kulangsu, a world heritage site and historical district, this paper include three results: (1) dividing the layout plans of Kulangsu modern Western-style houses into three types, that is, native prototypes, foreign prototypes, and mixed prototypes, with 39 sub-types in total; (2) establishing shape grammar for the layout plans of Kulangsu modern Western-style houses with shape grammar sets and “S, L, R, I” expression rules; (3) creating a digital form generation method based on shape grammar result by Grasshopper software, including function cluster creation, function cluster connection and final model generation. This paper presents an example of quantitative analysis of heritage culture and a rapid modeling method of heritage, providing a reference for the construction of a heritage culture database and digital heritage management in historic districts.
... In previous papers, the authors described and analyzed Hajjar's single-family architecture [2], European architecture, and the Bauhaus style through the work of Gropius and Breuer in the US [3], and the traditional architecture of the State College area [4]. These analyses were performed by developing shape grammars of Hajjar's single-family houses in State College, Gropius-Breuer's houses in the United States, and the traditional American architecture of the context in which Hajjar's work evolved. ...
... It was designed in 1937 with construction ending in 1938. As the authors explain in a previous paper [3], modest in scale in comparison to other houses in the area, Gropius House was revolutionary in terms of its impact. Traditional elements of New England architecture, such as wood, brick, and local stone were combined with modern materials, such as glass block, acoustical plaster, and chrome banisters. ...
... Additionally, Hajjar's use of the rectangular pattern/grid and the driving elements of his interior plans are to some extent similar to the interior plan of Gropius House. As explained in a previous paper [3], similarities between Hajjar's designs and those of Gropius-Breuer in the United States became more pronounced following the period Breuer spent studying binuclear organization for American houses. That is, in 1943, Breuer spent time developing his idea of using a two-part organization ...
The purpose of this study is to analyze William Hajjar’s single-family houses in State College, PA, and compare and contrast them with the European modernist work of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in the United States and with the traditional American architecture of the context. This analysis was performed using shape grammar as a computational design methodology. Hajjar was a member of the architecture faculty at the Pennsylvania State University (commonly known as Penn State) and a practitioner in the area. The residential architecture he designed for and built in that context incorporates many of the formal and functional features typical of both modern European architecture and traditional American architecture. The theoretical outcomes of this study contribute towards answers to these central questions: Can shape grammars be used to verify and describe the possible hybridity between modern and traditional architecture in Hajjar’s work and, more broadly, architectural hybridity phenomena in general?
In this paper, shape grammar is implemented as a computational design methodology to analyze the design language of Donald Judd’s “100 untitled works in mill aluminum”—permanently installed at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Judd (1928–1994), an American artist, writer, and critic installed 100 aluminum objects—with the exact same outer dimensions (41″×51″×72″) but unique configuration, “all made from ½” mill aluminum plates—over a four-year period from 1982 through 1986 in two former artillery sheds of a de-commissioned US military base. The question we are seeking to answer is whether these 100 works belong to a system, and, if so, what that system is and what delimits the system to produce 100 objects and no more. Our hypothesis, having spent considerable time examining the works and exploring the archival materials, is that there is a system, but the system is tempered by improvisational moments at multiple junctures in the project. We are interested in deciphering the system, but also the moments of artistic improvisation by Judd. The project is significant in relation to serial art works of the 50’s and 60’s. We have been calling them “serial” assuming there is a serial order and a system in their repetition and variation, but this very issue has not been researched in the context of the present work. KeywordsDonald JuddDesign SystemShape Grammars
