A Grammatical Note on Utzon’s Vaults

Abstract

This paper outlines an analysis of Utzon’s process of ideating vault through the lens of shape grammar, from investigating the eureka moment of the spherical schema for the Sydney Opera House to interpreting vault schema generation in other, later projects. The results show that most of Utzon’s vault’s schemas can be generated with only a few rule schemas, and that the generated schema can produce various parts in the designs. This interpretative study can help to understand not only how an architect develops schemas to solve various problems within a project but also how principles from an earlier schema can be reused to formulate vault schema for different contexts.