Brasilia, Brazil, 29 March - 3 April 1999
Experiments with an archetypal building
Professor Philip Steadman
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
(Torrington Place Site)
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
England
tel (44) (0)171 380 7777
fax (44) (0)171 916 1887
email p.steadman@ucl.ac.uk
In a previous paper (Steadman, in press) the author has proposed an 'archetypal'
form of building, to which the forms of many real buildings with rectangular
geometry may be related, by continuous deformation of parts, and the suppression
of certain parts altogether. This is intended as a theoretical device,
which can be used both for the description and comparison of existing
buildings, and for the exploration of possibilities. The emphasis is less
on the detail of internal plan arrangement, more on those overall properties
of building envelopes which are determined by the constraints of natural
lighting and the close-packing of certain generic types of accommodation:
'cellular space', 'open plan space', and 'halls'.
The archetype can be imagined as a 3D matrix of cubelets. The form of
any real building into which it is transformed, is produced in effect
by selecting horizontal and vertical 'slices' of this matrix. The resulting
conflagration can be described by a matrix of binary numbers, and its
metric dimensions by three dimensioning vectors in x, v and z. This paper
investigates some aspects of the arithmetic of this representation, including
methods for deriving volumes and surface areas; rules for ensuring that
built forms are structurally coherent and conform to the constraints of
natural lighting; and methods for describing in arithmetical terms a number
of geometrical characteristics which might be useful in indexing, sorting
and comparing built forms.
The work is not strictly in the central tradition of space syntax, but
it shares much of its philosophy; indeed the archetypal building, serves
to clarify some of the very broad limitations which lighting and close-packing
place on the topology of circulation networks in buildings.
Steadman P (in press) 'Sketch for an archetypal building', Environment
and Planning B: Planning and Design, 25th Anniversary number
_______________________________
_______________________________