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ItemSketches Count: The Mies Van Der Rohe’s Dirksen Courthouse Archive Redrawn(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-12-06) Park, JamesMies van der Rohe’s Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago built in 1964 is arguably one of the most significant buildings in the history of judicial architecture in the United States and abroad because of its transformative role in the formulation of the conventions underlying contemporary courthouse design. Archived in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art New York, a significant resource associated with the design of the courthouse is the extensive documentation of the design process at the office of Mies. This body of work consists of 135 sketches, diagrams, and drawings, features alternative solutions, variational schemes, and sectional innovations, and provides an untapped resource to allow a closer look at the expressive range of the architectural language and the technical innovations proposed by one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. The research takes on the Mies van der Rohe Archive and begins to flesh out the implicit design possibilities that the preliminary representations from the design process of the Dirksen Courthouse present: Are all these possibilities parts of the final scheme that was promoted in the end? If not, are there common themes that pervade each one of them? How important are some design ideas that belong exclusively to some of them but did not appear in the final design? To speculate these in depth, how much effort would it take to complete each of the design variations outlined by the preliminary representations? Can they be completed given the clues in the final design? If not, is it because they are not productive or they are just not compliant with the final scheme? In the end, how significant is this design process to contemporary courthouse design? The work here attempts to address these questions through a formal specification of a shape grammar that foregrounds common characteristics and unique ideas presented in the set of preliminary representations. Ambitiously, the work proposes a formal reconstruction of the final courtroom floor plan of the Dirksen Courthouse and an automated completion of the preliminary representations of key courtroom floor design variations from the design process of the courthouse, materializing the unrealized possibilities embodied in them. More specifically, a generative description of Mies van der Rohe’s courthouse design language is presented in the form of a shape grammar designed and implemented in the Shape Machine, a pioneering recursive shape rewriting technology. The grammar is proposed as an open-ended set of shape rules that can be readily expanded to complete an increasing number of design variations documented in the archive and generate some hypothetical ones that can be, in principle, generated by this dynamic grammar. Significantly, at any moment, new shape rules can be introduced seamlessly, as an intrinsic part of the design process of the grammar, without requiring the reformatting of existing rules or advocating the design of a singular Miesian grammar. The work concludes with a critical assessment of the sequences of the rule applications for the generation of complete courtroom floor plans. The contributions of the dissertation are (a) a generative description of Mies van der Rohe’s courthouse design language in the form of a shape grammar that is designed based on the final design of the Dirksen Courthouse and its design process documented in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art New York; (b) a formal reconstruction of the final courtroom floor plan of the courthouse; (c) an automated completion of the preliminary representations of key courtroom floor design variations from the design process of the courthouse; (d) a critical account on the significance of the design process of the courthouse in the contemporary courthouse design discourse with an emphasis on the innovative sectional idea of the courtrooms as an unrealized possibility in the making of the final courtroom floor plan, which still remains to be rediscovered in the designing of new courthouses; and (e) some speculations on the significance of the computational method developed for the research in the field of shape computation and on its potential role in bridging the gaps between sketching, diagramming, drafting, and modeling in the digital workflows of architects and designers.
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ItemShape Machine: shape embedding and rewriting in visual design(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-07-27) Hong, Tzu-Chieh KurtShape grammar interpreters have been studied for more than forty years addressing several areas of design research including architectural, engineering, and product design. At the core of all these implementations, the operation of embedding – the ability of a shape grammar interpreter to search for subshapes in a geometry model even if they are not explicitly encoded in the database of the system – resists a general solution. It is suggested here that beyond a seemingly long list of technological hurdles, the implementation of shape embedding, that is, the implementation of the mathematical concept of the “part relation” between two shapes, or equivalently, between two drawings, or between a shape and a design, is the single major obstacle to take on. This research identifies five challenges underlying the implementation of shape embedding and shape grammar interpreters at large: 1) complex entanglement of the calculations required for shape embedding and a shape grammar interpreter at large, with those required by a CAD system for modeling and modifying geometry; 2) accumulated errors caused by the modeling processes of CAD systems; 3) accumulated errors caused by the complex calculations required for the derivation of affine, and mostly, perspectival transformations; 4) limited support for indeterminate shape embedding; 5) low performance of the current shape embedding algorithms for models consisting of a large number of shapes. The dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive engineering solution to all these five challenges above. More specifically, the five contributions of the dissertation are: 1) a new architecture to separate the calculations required for the shape embedding and replacement (appropriately called here Shape Machine) vs. the calculations required by a CAD system for the selection, instantiation, transformation, and combination of shapes in CAD modeling; 2) a new modeling calibration system to ensure the effective translation of geometrical types of shapes to their maximal representations without cumulative calculating errors; 3) a new dual-mode system of the derivation of transformations for shape embedding, including a geometric approach next to the known algebraic one, to implement the shape embedding relation under the full spectrum of linear transformations without the accumulated errors caused by the current algorithms; 4) a new multi-step mechanism that resolves all cases of indeterminate embeddings for shapes having fewer registration points than those required for a shape embedding under a particular type of transformation; and 5) a new data representation for hyperplane intersections, the registration point signature, to allow for the effective calculation of shape embeddings for complex drawings consisting of a large number of shapes. All modules are integrated into a common computational framework to test the model for a particular type of shapes – the shapes consisting of lines in the Euclidean plane in the algebra U12.
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ItemThe Portman Variations: A Critical Approach to Entelechy I Mediated by Shape Machine(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-10-20) Ligler, Heather MichelleJohn Portman’s work is perplexing and polarizing. Characterized by his atria that captivate the popular imagination and his hybrid practice as architect-developer that redefined skylines throughout the world, but also ambivalently caricatured and dismissed for these same moves, the question of his impact remains blurry. This tension in Portman’s assessment has been described as paradoxical and in fact, a closer look at the scholarship on his work reinforces this as an ongoing condition – one that highlights the challenges of interpreting the work. Yet, Portman’s own imaginative account of his practice emphasizes another perspective. In reflections throughout his life, he referenced his 1964 house, Entelechy I, as the generator informing his entire corpus and the key design to understanding his architectural principles across all scales and programs. The research here takes on the productive myth of Entelechy I – and its presumed adaptable and repetitive logic – as the impetus to develop a shape grammar on the plan of the house. This grammar is then the basis for generating variations that address the transformation of spatial relationships in the house revisited for other design contexts. Significantly, this two-stage procedure is mechanically (and automatically) implemented in Shape Machine for Rhino, a new shape grammar interpreter developed at the Shape Computation Lab (SCL) in the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology. Subsequently, the implementation of the Entelechy grammar reproduces the design of the original house and a series of new designs too – here proposed as Portm-Inoes to systematically recontextualize the house as a postmodern reinvention of Corbusier’s Dom-Ino. In addition, the corresponding adaptation of parts of the grammar under different predicates yields transformation grammars that generate a series of plans at various scales to interpret Portman’s broader corpus of interior, hospitality, urban, and residential designs. The contributions of the dissertation are: a) a critical compilation of perspectives on John Portman encompassing various interpretations that have remained so far distinct including connections to the Aristotelian and Emersonian philosophical underpinnings of the work; b) a formal approach to interpret Entelechy I in an automated shape grammar; c) a series of implemented transformation grammars that further redescribe Portman’s architectural language in interior, hospitality, urban, and residential designs; d) an assessment of Portman’s work derived by correlating the predicates, transformations, and shape rules in the grammars with fundamental aspects of design including the use of Platonic geometries, self-similarity, figure-ground reversal, boundary ornamentation, offset forms, and their combinations; and e) the setup of a constructive cycle of design propositions and evaluations achieved in Shape Machine to mechanically execute line drawings in an automated environment.