Supporting conceptual design in architecture by linguistic model

It is shown that linguistic approach can be very useful when developing software supporting conceptual design in architecture. Treating primitives, like rooms, as letters of a certain language and capturing the knowledge about the architecture in a grammar allows us to implement automatic reasoning. It turns out that grammars describing hierarchical graphs are best suited for this purpose. The formalism underlying this approach is presented together with a prototype software that allows the user to convert functional requirements into layouts of the designed building, to visualise the resulting alternative solutions and to select the best one for the detailed design. The usage of this software is demonstrated on two examples.