Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

The question is broached of the development of a conceptual framework for examining the genesis of skyscraper construction in Chicago. At the outset it is emphasised that a theoretical perspective should be embraced which is both cognisant of the complex social relations surrounding building production and consumption and the dialectical relationship between the individual and the social. The empirical work on the Chicago skyscrapers and theoretical approaches to skyscraper development are reviewed, in order to assess their specific contribution to the question posed. It is noted that these approaches do not address the theoretical issues identified. From this position the advantages of a materialist perspective are detailed, with an examination of the contribution of political economy, Williams's cultural materialism, and Giddens's structuration theory to an analysis of the social process of skyscraper production and consumption. It is argued that these conceptual frameworks together embrace the theoretical concerns of the paper, providing a perspective which is cognisant of the social, political, and cultural relations surrounding skyscraper production and consumption and the role of individual creative practice within this wider social process.

A composition system is developed within a rectilinear grid from a vocabulary of quintessential architectural components: the column, the wall, and the floor/roof component. Sets of modules 30 cm × 30 cm × 30 cm and multimodules 120 cm × 120 cm × 150 cm are formed from combinations of these components. Formation rules govern the three-dimensional assemblage of the modules and multimodules to form a hierarchy of architectural compositions. The modules, the multimodules, and the formation rules are all characterized by Boolean representation.

Some relationships between work-load fluctuations and quality of building design are explored. Designers' experience of temporary overstraining and slackness indicates divergent views, associated with level of responsibility. There follow implications for building quality in boom (such as that current in the United Kingdom at the time of writing) and recession. Designers' maximisation of advancement and enjoyment, with respect to different stages of projects, is proposed as an influence on building quality.

Theoretical and experimental results from the implementation of a system for computer-aided floor-plan design are reported. The system is based on a potentially exhaustive search for solutions that satisfy user-specified constraints, but the paper concentrates on techniques for limiting and guiding the search. The emphasis is on two aspects of floor-plan design: the use of a formalized concept of sketching, and the language in which design constraints are specified by the user. A well-defined concept of abstract draft plans is achieved by limiting corner coordinates to intervals, rather than single numbers. Mathematical properties of drafts and their defining constraints as derived from the user's constraints are outlined, and the role of drafts in computer-aided floor-plan design is investigated and illustrated by examples. The specification language is based on a small set of primitives whose combined power of expression is also illustrated. The syntax and semantics of the language are formally defined (in two appendices), and the importance of careful development of languages for future design automation is pointed out.

In this work the use of solid modeling for the representation and analysis of complex architectural structures and details is illustrated. Although the approach is a general one, it is demonstrated and implemented on the visual representation and evaluation of mediaeval basilican structures. Basilican structures have the advantage that rules of composition for defining their form are well formulated. These rules are imposed on the solid modeler as a high hierarchy architectural language. It is within this language that the basilican structures are described and analyzed.

This is the first in a series of three papers in which the methodological status of Q-analysis is investigated. Is Q-analysis an esoteric skill, or a general scientific methodology? For completeness the main ideas of Q-analysis are developed from first principles. Then one can investigate if Q-analysis has a body of explicit knowledge and procedures for describing complex systems, formulating theories of their behaviour, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation, The ‘expert system test’ is set tip to ask if the body of knowledge in Q-analysis can be made sufficiently explicit to become the predicates and rules of an expert system. A positive result would certainly indicate methodology, and it is indeed possible to abstract a number of explicit procedures and rules which scientists can follow when investigating complex systems. The extent to which these might form a replicable methodology which could in principle be implemented as an expert system is discussed in the second and third papers.