Morphogenetic Typologies

A studio investigating pre-20th-century wing-based building types as rule-based systems capable of generating new architectural variations.

Palaces, manor houses, pavilion hospitals, asylums, radial prisons, and Palladian villas were treated as formal machines whose plans, wings, courtyards, axes, thresholds, and circulation structures developed through repeatable organizational principles.

The first half of the semester focused on computational analysis. Students reconstructed historical buildings and reduced complex plans into legible systems of symmetry, proportion, triangulation, subdivision, repetition, accretion, and branching.

The second half shifted from analysis to synthesis. Agentic scripting tools including Cursor and Codex helped translate extracted rules into recursive algorithms and generative interfaces capable of producing controlled families of massing, plan, and spatial configurations.

Final projects combined precedent diagrams, typological taxonomies, digital reconstructions, scripted systems, parametric models, and synthetic outputs. Each project tested how far a typological identity could vary before becoming unstable or transforming into a new formal species.