A Transformation Grammar for Housing Rehabilitation

• Author(s): Eloy, Sara ; Duarte, José
• Date: 2011
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/3003
• Origin: Repositório do ISCTE-IUL
• Subject(s): Building type; design analysis; algebra; measuring systems; shape grammars; transformations; space syntax; ICT
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

WOS:000289795900004 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science) The goal of this research is to rehabilitate the existing housing stock to meet the new needs of dwellers in the current information society and the consequent need for the integration of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and domotics in living areas. This article focuses on the use of both shape grammar and space syntax as tools to identify and encode the principles and rules behind the adaptation of existing houses to new requirements. The idea is to use such rules as part of a methodology for the rehabilitation of existing dwellings. The research proceeds in three steps. The first step aims to identify the dwellers’ demands and determine how the use of technology influences them. This step has been completed and the result was the definition of a set of ICT packages that are suitable for different family profiles. The second step aims to identify the functional, spatial, and constructive transformations performed by hand by human designers in order to infer the corresponding transformation rules and encode them into a grammar. This step is in progress and the expected result is a transformation grammar that can be used to adapt existing dwellings to specific families. The third step aims to test the grammar in other dwellings that are part of the corpus of the study. This final step will enable us to check whether the inferred rules provide the compositional tools needed for making new transformations to other existing dwellings for other families.