A Shape Grammar Based Expert System to Generate Traditional Turkish House Plan Layouts

Abstract

The traditional Turkish Houses have a long history, which has gone through many stages of development in Anatolia and Rumeli in the last five centuries. The purpose of this study is to experience the formal and syntactic information underlying the plan layouts of traditional Turkish Houses having a certain design language through an interactive and highly visual expert system. In the study, the shape grammar was applied as the method. Shape grammar enables the analysis of design languages of algorithmic structure and the production of new designs. By referring to the shape grammar, an algorithm is developed to generate plan layouts. Developed algorithm is interpreted to computer by using “Processing” coding interface. The input data is derived from Cagdas’s study named as “A Shape Grammar: The Language of Traditional Turkish Houses”. The generation process is executed by users, due to the interactive structure of the expert system by the help of keyboard. The shape grammar interpreter in this study helps users to understand the formal compositions and plan layouts of traditional Turkish houses. System also record numerous plan layout alternatives generated by users.