Modeling Architectural Styles: decoding typological approach in Nineteenth-century Italian railway stations drawings using generative shape grammars

This study explores the integration of shape grammars and generative modeling to describe the architectural language of Nineteenth-century Italian railway stations. Shape grammars, known for their ability to generate and understand design rules, finds in generative modeling, primarily used in contemporary architecture, a innovative support that embeds design decisions into form-making algorithms. However, the combined use of these methods to illustrate architectural styles is underrepresented in design and architecture history. Analyzing historical drawings, the aim of this paper is to develop shape grammar algorithms able to decode the compositional design strategy in the case study of Railway Stations' heritage. The process involves synthesizing a corpus of well-documented examples and identifying design patterns. These patterns are then translated into Grasshopper environment, creating algorithms tested for reproducing and generating architectural instances. The results can lead to strategies for studying architectural styles and for analyzing the role of typological approach in design history.