Design grammars: a few references

Scott Chase

Revised as of



Web sites

Shape grammar page maintained at MIT: http://www.shapegrammar.org/

Grammars in Design: http://personal.strath.ac.uk/s.c.chase/grammars/

Hau Hing's Shape Grammars Home Page and Mailing List: http://leva.leeds.ac.uk/shape-grammars/

Formal grammars

Chomsky N, 1957 Syntactic Structures (Mouton, The Hague)

any introductory computer science text which covers finite automata & formal languages

Shape grammar formalisms

Economou A, 1999, "The symmetry lessons from Froebel building gifts", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26:1 75-90

Gips J, Stiny G, 1980, "Production systems and grammars: a uniform characterization", Environment and Planning B 7 399-408

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

Knight T W, 1994 Transformations in Design: A Formal Approach to Stylistic Change and Innovation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England)

Knight T W, 1998, "Designing a shape grammar: Problems of predictability", Artificial Intelligence in Design Eds J S Gero, F Sudweeks (Kluwer, Dordrecht)

Knight T W, 1999, "Shape grammars: Six types", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26:1 15-31

Knight T W, forthcoming, "Shape Grammars: Five Questions", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design

Krstic D, 1999, "Constructing algebras of design", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26:1 45-57

Krstic D M, 1996, Decompositions of shapes Ph.D dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles

Longenecker S N, Fitzhorn P A, 1991, "A Shape Grammar for Non-Manifold Modeling", Research in Engineering Design 2:3 159-170

Stiny G, 1980, "Introduction to shape and shape grammars", Environment and Planning B 7 343-351

Stiny G, 1981, "A note on the description of designs", Environment and Planning B 8 257-267

Stiny G, 1986, "A New Line on Drafting Systems", Design Computing 1 5-19

Stiny G, 1990, "What is a design?", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 17 97-103

Stiny G, 1991, "The Algebras of Design", Research in Engineering Design 2 171-181

Stiny G, 1992, "Weights", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 19 413-430

Stiny G, Gips J, 1972, "Shape grammars and the generative specification of painting and sculpture" in Information Processing 71 Ed C V Freiman (North-Holland, Amsterdam) 1460-1465

Shape grammar examples

Agarwal M, Cagan J, 1998, "A Blend of Different Tastes: The Language of Coffee Makers", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 25:2 205-226

Chase S C, Koh J, 2000, "Integration of Shape Grammars With Architectural Design Studio Projects" in CAADRIA 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Computer Aided Architecture Design Research in Asia Ed B-K Tan, M Tan, Y-C Wong (Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture, National University of Singapore) 169-179

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

Kirsch J L, Kirsch R A, 1986, "The structure of paintings: formal grammar and design", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 13 163-176

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

Knight T W, 1986, "Transformations of the Meander motif in Greek geometric pottery", Design Computing 1 29-67

Knight T W, 1989, "Transformations of De Stijl art: the paintings of Georges Vantongerloo and Fritz Glarner", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 16 51-98

Knight T W, 1992, "Designing with Grammars" in CAAD futures '91 Ed G N Schmitt (Vieweg, Wiesbaden) 33-48

Koning H, Eizenberg J, 1981, "The language of the prairie: Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses", Environment and Planning B 8 295-323

Stiny G, 1977, "Ice-ray: a note on the generation of Chinese lattice designs", Environment and Planning B 4 89-98

Stiny G, Mitchell W J, 1978, "The Palladian grammar", Environment and Planning B 5 5-18

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

Tapia M, 1992, "Chinese lattice designs and parametric shape grammars", The Visual Computer 9 47-56

Other design grammars

Brown K N, McMahon C A, Sims Williams J H, 1995, "Features, aka The Semantics of a Formal Language of Manufacturing", Research in Engineering Design 7:3 151-172

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

Fenves S J, Baker N C, 1988, "Grammars for Functional and Spatial Reasoning in Design" in Computing in Civil Engineering: Microcomputers to Supercomputers (American Society of Civil Engineers) 819-828

Longenecker S N, Fitzhorn P A, 1988, "Form + Function + Algebra = Feature Grammars" in Design Theory '88 Ed S L Newsome, W R Spillers, S Finger (Springer-Verlag, New York) 189-197

March L, 1999, "Architectonic of proportion: a shape grammatical depiction of classical theory", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26:1 91-100

Schmidt L C, Cagan J, 1996, "Grammars for machine design" in Artificial Intelligence in Design '96 Ed J S Gero, F Sudweeks (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht) 325-344

Schmidt L C, Shetty H, Chase S C, 1998, "A Graph Grammar Approach for Structure Synthesis of Mechanisms", in proceedings of ASME 1998 Design Engineering Technical Conference, Atlanta, GA, September 13Ð16, 1998

Shea K, Cagan J, 1998, "Generating structural essays from languages of discrete structures" in Artificial Intelligence in Design '98 Ed J S Gero, F Sudweeks (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht) 365-384

Shape grammars: computational issues and implementations

Chase S C, 1989, "Shapes and Shape Grammars: From Mathematical Model to Computer Implementation", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 16:2 215-242

Chase S C, 1999, "Grammar Based Design: Issues for User Interaction Models" in Media and Design Process, proceedings of ACADIA '99, Salt Lake City, Utah, 28Ð31 October, 1999 Ed O Ataman, J Bermœdez (Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture) 198Ð210

Heisserman J, 1994, "Generative Geometric Design", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 14:2 37-45

Knight T W, 1998, "Designing a shape grammar: Problems of predictability" in Artificial Intelligence in Design '98 Ed J S Gero, F Sudweeks (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht) 499-516

Krishnamurti R, 1980, "The arithmetic of shapes", Environment and Planning B 7 463-484

Krishnamurti R, 1981, "The construction of shapes", Environment and Planning B 8 5-40

Krishnamurti R, 1992, "The arithmetic of maximal planes", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 19 431-464

Krishnamurti R, 1992, "The maximal representation of a shape", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 19 267-288

Krishnamurti R, Giraud C, 1986, "Towards a shape editor: the implementation of a shape generation system", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 13 391-404

Li K, (1998), The Behaviour of Shape Schema Rules Ph.D thesis, University of Adelaide

Li K, Woodbury R, Radford A, 1998, "A comparison of shape grammars, parametric shape grammars and shape schema grammars" in proceedings of Mathematics and Design 98, 1-4 June 1998, San Sebastián, Spain

Stouffs R, Krishnamurti R, 1994, "The complexity of the maximal representation of shapes" in Formal Design Methods for CAD Ed J S Gero, E Tyugu (Elsevier, Amsterdam) 53-66

Tapia M A, 1996, From Shape to Style, Shape Grammars: Issues in Representation and Computation, Presentation and Selection Ph.D dissertation, University of Toronto

Tapia M, 1999, "A visual implementation of a shape grammar system", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26:1 59-73