| id |
ddss9860 |
| authors |
Vakalo, E-G. and Fahmy, A. |
| year |
1998 |
| title |
A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis and Derivation of Orthogonal Building Plans and Sections |
| source |
Timmermans, Harry (Ed.), Fourth Design and Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning Maastricht, the Netherlands), ISBN 90-6814-081-7, July 26-29, 1998 |
| summary |
Architects are generally perceived as “Formgivers with an extraordinary gift” (Ackerman, 1980:12). Implicit in this statement is the belief that the operations that architects employ to compose their designs are the product of a creative faculty that is beyond the reach of rational discourse, and thereby cannot be subjected to logical investigation. This view is detrimental to the advancement of knowledge about architectural composition and adversely affects both practice and education in architecture. More specifically, it prevents the architectural community from acquiring of a more refined conception about how architects derive their designs. In contrast to this view, this study demonstrates that architectural form-making is amenable to logical analysis. In specific, this is to be done through a theoretical and computational framework that describe and explain the tasks involved in the making of orthogonal building plans and sections. In addition to illustrating the susceptibility of architectural form-making to logical analysis, the frameworks proposed in this study overcome the limitations of previously established theories thatdeal with architectural form-making. These can be divided into two categories: normative and positive theories.Normative theories include architectural treatises and manifestos. A major limitation of normativetheories is that they have limited explanatory power. Their concern is with promoting a specific aesthetic ideology and prescribing rules that can be used to derive compositions that conform to it. Therefore, they cannot be used to explain form-making in general. Positive frameworks, such asshape grammar, rely on rules to describe derivation and analysis processes. Nevertheless, they do not provide a comprehensive description of the tasks involved in architectural form-making. This causes the relation between the rules and compositional tasks to be ambiguous. It also affects adversely the ability of these frameworks to provide architects with a complete understanding of the role of compositional rules in derivation or analysis processes. |
| series |
DDSS |
| type |
normal paper |
| full text |
 file.pdf (506,983 bytes) |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
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Ackerman, J. (1980)
 The History of Design and the Design of History
, VIA 4, 1980, pp. 12-18
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| last changed |
2010/05/16 09:11 |
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