Tracing hybridity in local adaptations of modern architecture: The case of A. William Hajjar's single-family architecture

The purpose of this study is to analyze William Hajjar's single-family houses in State College, PA, and compare and contrast them with the European modernist work of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in the United States and with the traditional American architecture of the context. This analysis was performed using shape grammar as a computational design methodology. Hajjar was a member of the architecture faculty at the Pennsylvania State University (commonly known as Penn State) and a practitioner in the area. The residential architecture he designed for and built in that context incorporates many of the formal and functional features typical of both modern European architecture and traditional American architecture. The theoretical outcomes of this study contribute towards answers to these central questions: Can shape grammars be used to verify and describe the possible hybridity between modern and traditional architecture in Hajjar's work and, more broadly, architectural hybridity phenomena in general?.