A design grammar for architectural languages

Abstract After a short reflection on the original idea of shape grammars and the underlying concepts, applications following these principles are characterized with regard to the general design theory. Especially the comparison with linguistics and the discussion about semantics will lead to a fundamental critique of shape grammars. In consequence, the replacement of the graphical or geometrical items, a shape grammar is based on, by objects within the object-oriented paradigm will provide the base of an improved approach. This will allow to reason about the design-objects themselves, rather than about one of their presentation forms. To prove some of these general ideas, a COlumn DEsigner CODE has been developed, which supports the automatic generation of colonnades. The system uses frames for the object description and different kinds of refinement operations to substitute these objects. Therefore chunks of knowledge og the appropriate architectural types are dynamically included into the design process. Finally, possible ways of the system's improvement will be brought into discussion to overcome the still recognized limitation of the actual approach on routine design, in detail: the influence of external systems, the rule of learning, and the integration into concurrent processing.