Introduction to generic rectangular floor plans

An important task in the initial stages of most architectural design processes is the design of planar floor plans, that are composed of non-overlapping rooms divided from each other by walls while satisfying given topological and dimensional constraints. The work described in this paper is part of a larger research aimed at developing the mathematical theory for examining the feasibility of given topological constraints and providing a generic floor plan solution for all possible design briefs. In this paper, we mathematically describe universal (or generic) rectangular floor plans with n rooms, that is, the floor plans that topologically contain all possible rectangular floor plans with n rooms. Then, we present a graph-theoretical approach for enumerating generic rectangular floor plans upto nine rooms. At the end, we demonstrate the transformation of generic floor plans into a floor plan corresponding to a given graph.