Form Follows Feng-shui: A Constraint-based Generative System for Housing

Abstract

Louis Sullivan′s dictum ″Form follows function″ can be changed to ″Form follows feng-shui″ in Eastern Asia; even today in the 21st century, feng-shui still constrains the design of residential layouts in Taiwan and Korea. In this paper we describe a generative system for form and space planning that supports the schematic design phase of housing through both functional and feng-shui constraints. The functional constraints include the size of each space component, adjacency, etc. The exterior environment of a house and making use of interactive relationship between the five-elements (wu-xing) are feng-shui constraints, which provide geometric information and suggest location and orientation of each component according to the resident′s personal information. We have implemented a prototype to illustrate how this works for residential space planning. The prototype augments a conventional CAD software with a knowledge-based system and a set of graphical user interface applications.