Leticia Teixeira Mendes

A Customization Grammar: Describing the customization process of apartment design

This article introduces the concept of Customization Grammar, an analytical shape grammar that describes the alterations introduced by homeowners to high-standard apartments before occupation. This is viewed as a contemporary phenomenon that reveals the incompatibility between social demands and housing units offered by the current real estate market in Recife, Brazil. It is expected that the proposed grammar could support mass customization design procedures and able to generate suitable housing units to current and future lifestyles.

Meta-PREVI Grammar

This paper describes part of a wider research that aimed at using Shape Grammar to generate more diverse and interesting urban spaces in Brazilian Social Housing developments. A shape grammar corresponding to design patterns was inferred from the PREVI Lima urban plan developed by C. Alexander [1] in the 1970s. The grammar was inferred from the plan layout and from the text instructions (or pattern descriptions) presented by Alexander, and can be applied to design new plans within a wider formal universe than what the plan layout would suggest. The final section of the paper points towards the development of generic grammars as a way of encapsulating good qualities of certain design projects and applying them to new situations.