[Back]

R. Schaffranek, P. Nourian:
"WORKSHOP 8: Generative Syntax in Architecture and Urban Design";
Talk: Advances in Architectural Geometry 2014, London; 09-18-2014 - 09-21-2014.

There are a few theories that describe and explain the role of spatial arrangement on the social interactions of people in built environments, best known of which is called Space Syntax. The term syntax, taken from linguistics, here refers to the [spatial] structure of the whole, as opposed to morphology, which looks at the qualities of individual items. Using these theories, we can analyze existing spatial configurations and in a way measure their socio-spatial performance. However, theories and methods for systematically generating spatial arrangements of certain properties are rare or not put into practice. Combining analytic theories (mostly based on graph theory) with the generation of geometry is at the core of the workshop. In this workshop, we will introduce computational methodologies that can help in generating spaces with known syntactic properties. Three toolkits and methodologies will be introduced: SpiderWeb, Syntactic and Configurbanist.