In this paper a systematic approach to dimensioning architectural floor plans to optimize multiple conflicting objectives is presented. The methodology is applied to solve the dimensioning problem of a house plan, where construction cost, total floor area and proportion ratio were considered the...

Rules of composition can play a decisive role in understanding.

An analysis of three modern British house types is described: the 19th-century terrace house, associated with the building byelaws of the 1870s and 1880s; the working-class 'cottage', designed and built by local authorities to new national standards introduced after World War 1; and the private...

In facility layouts -- the designing of floorplans with certain rooms adjacent to each other -- there are often area constraints for the rooms. Robinson and Janjic showed that, if areas are specified for rooms with a given maximal outerplanar adjacency graph, then any convex polygon with the...

In an analysis of the plans of existing three-room apartments built by the public sector in Israel, the graphs of the plans, representing the connections between activities, were checked. A comparison of these graphs with those generated by a computer model showed that many types of plans that...

In the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Mexico most of the population was housed in large apartment compounds, often about 60 m square and containing up to about 250 rooms. These structures have no close ethnographic or archaeological parallels. Many of them are so large and complex that it is...

Planning and design, especially in urban planning and architecture, are technical and transformative activities. Models drawn from the natural and social sciences are used to articulate the technical aspects, and those drawn from politics are used to articulate the transformative. Religion and...

Simple 'space syntax' techniques are used to explore the problem of spatially typing a sample of vernacular farmhouses in Normandy. It is suggested that such techniques can demonstrate that cultural ideas are objectively present in artefacts as much as they are subjectively present in minds.

In recent years, much attention has been focused on the construction of models for complex systems. Although many successful models of physical and biological systems have been developed, it has been found more difficult to model large social systems. Much of the difficulty can be attributed to...