ABSTRACT

The introduction sets out the initial position of text as design representation. Fundamentally the proposition is that Chomsky’s dictum – that finite syntax and lexicon can nevertheless generate an infinite number of useful (well-formed) structures – can be applied to artificial languages, and that texts can be written in those languages to generate architectural objects, taken to mean ‘well-formed’ configurations of space and form. This is the generative algorithm and the idea is that a generative algorithm is a description of the object just as much as the measurement and analysis of the object, the illustration of the object and the fact of its embodiment in the world.