Automatic Generation of Layouts of an Utzon Housing System via the Internet (2001)
article⁄Automatic Generation of Layouts of an Utzon Housing System via the Internet (2001)
abstract⁄The article describes how architectural layouts can be automatically generated over the Internet. Instead of using a standard web server sending out HTML pages to browser client, the system described here uses an approach that has become common since 1998, known as three tier clientserver applications. The server part of the system contains a layout generator using SPRs, which stands for ‘Spatial Production Rule System, String Version’, a standard context free string grammar. Each sentences of this language represents one valid Utzon house layout. Despite the fact that the system represents rules for laying out Utzon houses grammatically, there are important differences between SPRs and shape grammars. The layout generator communicates with Autocad clients by means of an application server, which is analogous to a web server. The point of this project is to demonstrate the idea that many hundreds or thousands of clients can request the generation of all of the Utzon layouts simultaneously over the Internet by the SPRs server, but the server never has to keep track when each client requested the generation of all of the layouts, or how many layouts each client has received.
