Fall 2026: ARCH 6508 | CS 6492 | ID 6508 Shape Grammars

ARCH 4803 | CS 4803 | Undergraduate offering
Athanassios Economou, PhD
M/W 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm | Success Center 152
Georgia Institute of Technology | Fall 2026

Shape grammars is a powerful formal system for the generative description of designs. Their unique difference with all other generative systems is that they perform entirely visual computations rather than symbolic computations. Shape grammars are intended to form a basis for purely visual computation and in this sense they belong in the heart of design education and practice – both in precedent analysis and in a studio setting.

The course discusses the foundations of shape grammar formalism, provides a constructive understanding of the formalism through hands-on workshops and offers a generous overview of the history and logic of several of its applications in design research. A particular focus is given on a systematic exposition of basic rule schemata and the ways they are ordered and combined in sums and products to produce a compositional taxonomy of design.

The course is open to Ph.D, MS. Arch, and M.Arch students. BS. Arch students and students from other departments and schools at Georgia Tech can take it with a special permit.

Shape Computation Lab

The way that the lab approaches modeling in design is radically different from past and current approaches including all current geometric, parametric and generative modeling approaches in computer-aided design.

The work at the lab builds on the shape grammar formalism and the ways it has theorized a new way of computing that foregrounds the visual over the symbolic, but significantly extends it to provide a new formal description, the shape signature, a uniform characterization of shape that can be used to calculate and visually represent all possible shapes made up of points, lines and arcs in CAD parametric models and a new shape grammar interpreter, the Shape Machine, designed from scratch in the lab on the reworking of the fundamentals of shape search.

Current projects deal with design automation, visual programming, intelligent CAAD systems, formal specification of shape and style, all foregrounding the visual – and computational – basis for design in spatial systems. The work draws upon relations with other disciplines at Georgia Tech including mathematics, computer science, cognitive science and philosophy.

Shape Machine CAD Demo

A series of three video vignettes showcasing simple and yet astonishing visual tasks in CAD workflows that the Shape Machine does effortlessly. In the first vignette a designer or an estimator counts instances of objects on the fly without requiring specially prepared drawings by some proprietary software. In the second vignette a designer edits a detail in a drawing and wishes to repeat the same process for all identical instances. In the third vignette a designer restructures a flat drawing in different layers to change its organizational structure.

People

The Shape Computation lab consists of a group of designers, computer scientists, and engineers dedicated to the study of shape and its leading role in design, design automation, visual programming, and intelligent CAAD systems.

News

Invited talks, presentations, paper releases, software releases, classes, awards – and everything else that pertains to the daily life of the lab

2025

Shape Computation @ Springer

Thanos Economou published the paper “Shape Machine: Shape-Based Search and Replace in CAD”. In: Kotsopoulos, S. (eds) Shape Computation. Mathematics and the Built Environment, vol 9. Birkhäuser, Cham, December 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81623-9_16

Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems

YeonTae Chung presented the paper “Modeling the Viewpoint Theory of Mental Rotation”, coauthored with Vijay Marupudi, Siddhartha Krishna Vemuri, Athanassios Economou, Sashank and published at the Twelfth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, Atlanta GA, November 6, 2025. https://openreview.net/forum?id=0R0VWvE4VL

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Thanos Economou will give an invited talk at the School of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on December 18, 2025, and a full-day workshop on Shape Machine the next day on December 19, 2025

Concave Lighting Talk Series

Thanos Economou will give an invited talk at the Concave Lighting Talk Series, n.03, ARCH East 214, Georgia Institute of Technology, on Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Featured Shape Grammar Projects

A handful of representative projects at a variety of scales and media including analog ones executed by pencil and eraser, three-dimensional Froebel blocks, and fully automated scripts in DrawScript in Shape Machine.

Shape Machine Symposium @ GT

The symposium presents the current state-of-the-art of the Shape Machine, a new computational, visual and disruptive technology, to leading experts in various fields including AI, engineering, computer science, mathematics and design to review, discuss, and envision the field of shape cognition and computing at Georgia Tech.

Featured Back-to-the-Future Studio Project

The Shape Machine Studio is the current iteration of a series of computational design studios built upon formal research on design languages and their ability to address specific constraints, programs and contexts. The Back to the Future Studio iteration of the Shape Machine Studio takes on Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand’s emphatic and obsessive propositions in his 1802 Précis of the Lectures on Architecture and uses them as a platform to inquire and test their claims, conventions and expressiveness and to ultimately elicit a constructive response by each student in the form of a design proposition embedded within current theories and practices of architecture.

Recent Publications

A handful of recent journal articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. The complete series is available at the Publications entry of the lab.

CourtsWeb

Designs emerge among the interrelations of symbolic descriptions including drawings, models, diagrams, renderings, texts, numbers and other symbolic data. Among them, the visual properties of the 2D and 3D geometric models – plans, sections, elevations, axons, perspectives, exploded axons and so forth, at all scales, views and combinations, and their different functionality in design workflows, including figure-ground diagrams, circulation diagrams, adjacency diagrams, visibility diagrams, lighting diagrams and so forth, provide an inexhaustible canvas for formal studies in the analysis of artifacts at all scales, from the object, to the urban frame. Courtsweb is a visually-driven, custom-made database designed and implemented in-house to foreground the formal description, interpretation and evaluation of the federal courthouses in the US.

Interested in our work?

If you are interested in joining the Shape Computation Lab as an undergraduate or graduate assistant for pay or academic credit contact our director, Thanos.

If you are interested in our work on Shape Machine and you are a member of the Georgia Tech community consider sitting down with us at the lab.