PATH-MAKER GRAMMAR

By abstracting the Fifty by Fifty plans series and finding the guidelines Mies seems to use in his universal spaces composition and the few barriers in his floorplans that allowed him to explore as mentioned in the introductory text for this project in the MoMA archive: Mies sought to produce buildings whose form, particularly whose outer form, was both incontrovertible and irreducible, but that within that form he could permit himself a startlingly wide range of freedom and invention [1].

[1] L. Mies Van Der Rohe, The Mies Van Der Rohe Archive, Volume 15, A. Drexler, Ed. New York, NY, USA: Garland Pub., 1986.

By generalizing the composition we have shapes ready to iterate and transform step by step. 

There are 2 main features: A) The central space which in Mies floorplans will be the service area(kitchen/bathroom) B) and C) The walls suggest enclosure for the personal spaces in the house. The steps to follow this grammar allow you to move the shapes in a designated axis to create a composition. 

Taking this idea into the urban design or landscape scope made me think about path planning, how we move inside these design spaces, and how it aims to connect all the sides of the public space and make them interesting so people would want to engage and wonder, the sidewalks that surround public spaces act like a margin that offsets the interior path design. That idea translates into a rule to connect all the iterations of the individual compositions. The last rule allows rotating and it will add generative potential to the designs created.