Shape grammars were first introduced by Gips and Stiny in 1972, as an idea to describe visual shape compositions1. A shape grammar is a set of rules to specify how one shape or part of a shape can be replaced by another. This simple substitution process can be used to describe a certain design style or generate new
ones .
In other words, a shape grammar defines a design style in the form of algorithms that manipulate the design components. Several computer systems have demonstrated shape grammars to generate shapes with a certain graphic or architectural style. Much work in shape grammar has analyzed an instance of design style with a set of rules and showed how the rules can be used to generate new designs1.
