Local Adaptation of the International Style - Contextualizing Global Architecture between East and West

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight the effectiveness of shape grammar as a computational design methodology for verifying and describing hybridity in architectural design and generating a contextualized architecture. Part of a larger study, the present paper focuses on describing and verifying the respective influences of European modern and American traditional architecture on the mid-twentieth-century houses designed and built by a Penn State faculty-practitioner in State College, a college town in central Pennsylvania that is home to the university's largest campus. This hybridity phenomenon is analyzed using the shape grammar methodology, which is then also used to generate a hybrid architecture, not only for the same context, but also for contexts worldwide. Results from a workshop on the local adaptation of modern architecture focusing on the hybridity between the Persian garden style and the International Style of architecture to generate architecture appropriate to the context of Shiraz, the ancient capital of Iran, are analyzed in order to advance discussions of the methodology.