Representing Style by Feature Space Archetypes: Description and Emulation of Spatial Styles in an Architectural Context

Style is a broad term that could potentially refer to any features of a work, as well as a fluid concept that is subject to change and disagreement. A similarly flexible method of representing style is proposed based on the idea of an archetype, to which real designs can be compared, and tested with examples of architectural plans. Unlike a fixed, symbolic representation, both the measurements of features that define a style and the selection of those features themselves can be performed by the machine, making it able to generalise a definition automatically from a set of examples. At its core, style is what distinguishes one group of works from another. This paper proposes that we can define a style using an archetype, an ideal model comprised of the features that exemplify the style. This concept differs from the description of a type, or category into which particular examples can fall, and from that of a prototype, precedent or case, which are actual instances on which later examples can be modelled. An archetype is something between the two, a generalisation that can not exist materially, yet matches and is compared to many actual instances. This is almost certainly not a real example, but an abstraction made up of only those features necessary to differentiate it from other archetypes. Many approaches to style are based on explicit symbolic representations (where fixed concepts are mapped to named variables) or rule systems. These can tell us useful things about designs and how they can be made, but are inflexible. They reveal some of the ways we learn about styles pedagogically, but typically fixed, historical ones. By contrast this work proposes a method to automatically derive representations from real examples of design. It is based on the mapping of design examples in a high dimensional feature space, and uses methods of dimensionality reduction of this space to yield an archetype that describes the style. This can be used to classify, and