Design a house typology : a case study of Boston's Back Bay

Abstract

This thesis aims at establishing a set of rules for the design of a house type in Boston's Back Bay. The theory of which this study is based on is built-form theory which undertake the morphological development of the spatial arrangement. The house type of Back Bay conceived as a set of rules that can prescribed formal relations among chosen elements at the block and building levels. The rules are applied for generating a house type. Type exists in the social body, which consolidates social agreement and therefore is closely related to the sharing of images. Rules can be used for describing the images in terms of physical forms and communicate the idea of type with architects and people who live the society. Also, they serve reference criteria and design guidelines, as control tools of design in our physical environment. This study consists of three major parts: Formulating design rules for urban block, facade and floor plan. For each part, a series of analyses are adopted: (1) block level: physical system and spatial system; (2) facade system: facade decomposition, hierarchical organization and generative rule system; (3) floor plan system: floor plan structure. A set of dimensional system are also generated for the test of design rules.