A discursive grammar for customizing mass housing: The case of Siza's houses at Malagueira

The ultimate goal of the described research is a process for mass customizing housing based on computer-aided design and production systems. The current goal is the development of an interactive system for generating solutions on the Web based on a modeling approach called discursive grammar. A discursive grammar consists of a programming grammar and a designing grammar. The programming grammar generates design briefs based on user data; the designing grammar provides the rules for generating designs in a particular style, and a set of heuristics guides the generation of designs towards a solution that matches the design brief. This paper describes the designing grammar using Siza's houses at Malagueira as a case study.