Long Abstract
This dissertation engages a contemporary challenge that has surfaced in the last decade: how architecture and design can be integrated into the broader transdisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence through computation. Architecture’s longstanding pursuit to synthesize aesthetics with resilient structure and social function presents new frontiers for contemporary models of computing, including those shaped by the rise of data-driven AI. Underlying this challenge is a need to bridge open-ended aesthetic inquiry and mathematical formality in computing methods, which is the subject of this dissertation. The work presented here contributes to two areas of research, specifically within the formal computational design theory discourse of shape grammars.

First, by taking as background developments in “mathematics of shapes,” it introduces new methods for the structural description and geometric computation of form in design. A new framework is developed for working with “point-set free” topological descriptions and for analyzing important properties of computations, such as the continuity of rules involving compatible and incompatible design descriptions. Further, a new approach to studying the geometric properties of “construction lines” and “registration marks” is presented, two concepts currently at the basis of algorithmic implementations of shape embedding. These results illustrate a broader methodological direction for linking the areas of architecture and design with mathematics and computing, whereby visual and spatial intuitions in the former are taken as the source and the starting point for developments in the latter.

Second, as part of a recent direction toward assimilating aesthetic theory into visual calculating with shapes, it develops an aesthetic evaluation system in which responses to aesthetic objects are formulated on the basis of descriptions of their forms. While the system is formulated in general terms, its application to three of the most well documented rule-based aesthetic systems—Birkhoff’s aesthetic measure, Algorithmic Aesthetics, and Structural Information Theory—shows that it uniformly assimilates aesthetic responses which are based on notions of unity (order) and variety (complexity), measured individually or in terms of some ratio that interrelates them. Expanding on the topic of aesthetic intelligence, the last part of the dissertation discusses the role of aesthetic value judgements in educational programs connecting computing with design, and why they are a necessary component in the pursuit for models of human intelligence amidst a broader direction in computing toward valuation and “judging” systems interfacing with human life.

Public Dissertation Defense – Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022 12:00-2:00pm
Room: 9-255 (A), MIT Campus, Cambridge, MA

Committee:

George Stiny (chair), Professor of Design and Computation
Terry Knight, William and Emma Rogers Professor of Design and Computation
Caitlin Mueller, Associate Professor of Architecture and Civil & Environmental Engineering