Research

Taxonomy of Architecture Animals

Revisit Lionel March: How the Animals of Architecture are different?

University of Kansas
2025

This work is aiming for differentiating shapes by examining their subshapes focuses on identifying smaller, fundamental components within a larger shape to distinguish it from others. This approach involves finding (or embedding) subshapes in 369 shapes, specifically 8-ominos from March's 1974 work (March and Matela). The subshapes, such as L-corners, T-intersections, X-intersections, or combinations like two L-corners defining a space or a T and an L shape arranged in specific ways, are designed to differentiate shapes with architectural meaning. These subshapes help explain why one shape is different from another from an architectural perspective.

In this study, a system called the Shape Indexer is implemented to exhaustively find a desired subshape within the 369 shapes. It also provides the total number of each subshape for all 369 shapes and produces the results for further analysis. This research aims to evaluate and classify shapes within the context of architectural design. Additionally, the study could offer an alternative way to study shapes by retrieving subshapes as data, potentially aiding applications in computer vision and AI training.