A Palladian construction grammar—design reasoning with shape grammars and rapid prototyping

Presented is a production system that generates information for physical model manufacture with a 3D-printing device. Defined here as a <i>construction grammar</i>, rule sets based on 16th-century-masonry construction are used to generate a villa model as a 3D construct. The derivation of the grammar demonstrates a design process based on physical constraints as the primary means of grammar structuring. The paper claims that construction rules can be used to build villas in Palladio’s corpus, starting with a floor-plan drawing as the initial shape, with little need for an elevation drawing. This paper introduces unexplored issues of physical reasoning in the field of computing and design as part of the rule-building process. As a detailed example, a Palladian villa (the Villa Cornaro) is fabricated as a 3D-printed model (scale 1:120) from an eleven-part set of rules based on field analysis of Palladio’s constructed villas.