Analyzing Building Patterns Within Commercial Plots In Urban Center Based On Shape Grammar

Urban Design aims to create urban space and environment for specific purpose, in which the understanding of urban space should be in the first place. However the understanding of urban space still stays on the surface among practitioners, which leads to bad decisions during design process. Giving researches on urban morphology could increase the understanding of urban space among practitioners, which could lead to better urban design.There are three levels in the research on urban morphology and the building is the most basic unit of urban patterns. From the point of view of architecture, building pattern is the most relevant which influence the urban space directly. According to<Urban Spatial Form and Its Shape Control of the City of Nanjing>, the basic urban patterns includes public buildings and residential buildings. However the public building patterns, especially the building patterns within commercial plots in urban center, are not explained clearly enough for its complex composition. Therefore this paper aims at the commercial plots in urban center and tries to analyze the building patterns.Typology research and spatial morphology research are two ways of urban morphology study. Typology research focuses on the historical changing of the urban patterns, which is not convenient for description of the relations of forms. While spatial morphology research focuses on the abstract relations of the space which is lack of explant on solid forms. So fat neither of the ways could explain building patterns of commercial plots clearly.Researches on shape grammar start in the 70’s during the last century and there are more and more scholars use shape grammar to describe and analyze the urban forms for its advantages in describing commotional of forms as well as logics. Therefore, this paper tries to analyze building patterns from the composition of forms by using shape grammar.This paper picks 52 slices of plots in the three main urban centers in Nanjing, China and by analyzing building forms and the relations among plot elements, use shape grammar to reveal the basic compositional logics of building patterns. Furthermore, this paper purpose a method to describe and create building patterns based on shape grammar.The whole thesis contains about 38000 words,165 pictures and charts.