Shape Grammars: Where are the People?

I played with shape grammars a la Stiny and Bill Mitchell (amongst others)
a few years ago. Some misc observations:

* Shape grammars seem to be a rather good way of describing a large number
of spatial and syntactic properties of buildings. Traditional ways of
architectural description have always done a rather poor job of this, using
the typically vague and nebulous talk of art-speak.

* As such they are probably a good way of compactly talking about 'style'.

* That said, their originators (ie Stiny et al) wildly overestimate their
importance. If you examine their writings, the authors seem to have the
idea that architecture is nothing but descriptions of geometry, topology
and spatial arrangement. I was struck by the, well, inhumanity in their
writing. THERE ARE NO PEOPLE living in the buildings described by (the
authors of) shape grammars, only patterns floating in an algorithmic space.
Bloodless, cold, arid: all these came to mind when I read Mitchell's last
book.

* There is also a strong feeling of right-wing politics behind all this
sort of thing. I can't quite pin it down just why I feel that. Possibly the
sense that the authors are people who see the world as rightfully
meticulously ordered (as opposed to the fuzzy mess it really is), and they
are the people who should trim all those horrible human uncertainties into
a pristine, precise, digitally accurate mechanism. The same sort of
mentality as the more anally-retentive engineers, a particularly right-wing
lot (Note: not an unsupported assertion. References can be supplied. FYI,
architects usually come in as middle-of-the road)

Garry Stevens
Dept of Architectural and Design Science
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
AUSTRALIA
Partial thread listing: