A Generic Shape Grammar for the Palladian Villa, Malagueira House, and Prairie House

Shape grammars are formulations consisting of transformation rules that describe design. Previous studies have focused on recreating the style of family-related solutions. This study does not aim to recreate a specific architectural style but is part of wider research aimed at inferring shape grammars. It is believed that more than one grammar can be developed for the same style, but no one has ever demonstrated this possibility. In addition, no one has ever developed a grammar that can describe more than one style. The aim of this work is to demonstrate both possibilities. Firstly, it proposes a shape grammar that can produce three different design styles, and, secondly, it uses a process that is distinctively different from other tested examples yet still produces the same corpus of designs. It also enables a new corpus of designs to be produced, which had not been possible using the previous (or original) grammars. A selected case study of three grammars, namely for Palladian, Prairie and Malagueira houses, allowed for comparison and observation of the different processes and shape rules and for a new set of rules to be proposed, combined in a shape grammar. This was followed by the recreation of a new subdivision type of grammar with a top–down approach and a set of generic design rules. The result is a generic shape grammar that enables three different house styles to be designed from the same formulation.