Posted by Richard Phillips.
Thomas was an NKS Summer School participant. He said the experience was foundational for his research.
Thomas described a somewhat complicated system (although I may have misunderstood) for using Shape Grammar's - which are basically sets of rules for describing shapes in a generative way.
He addressed System Architecture, Generating a Solution Space, the CA rule space, and he gave examples.
He said a goal is wanting to look a variety of designs rather than just a few.
His approach involves quite alot of details and I didn't follow the details of this model.
The first example was a brick bridge structure.
He described many of the details of the rules, and how to turn the Shape Grammar into a cellular automaton rule.
He showed many examples of system architectures developed for the bridge application. This involves multiple stages.
A final example, of an historic Roman aquaduct, showed how you can look at an existing structure from the point of view of shape grammars.
Some concluding points included the attempt to capture a style of design, and the usefulness of having modular configurations.
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