Al-Qadisiyah Journal for Engineering Sciences

Abstract Traditional architecture style represents the evolutionary style and experienced characteristics of an urban environment that give a sense of place and identity. This style includes a mixture of technical and cognitive values that are difficult to conserve compared to other material resources. The process of organizing and classifying the architectural elements of these constructions in a virtual digital manner is one of the means of preventive conservation of the built heritage.  Many international experiments have employed the shape grammar in analyzing the structure of the historic elements because of its ability to combine the dimensional and morphological values, to classify them into a variety of categories with common characteristics according to the local architectural language. The study seeks to determine the approaches of the shape grammar to derive the rules and its relationships that used in the virtual reconstruction according to the traditional architectural principles, and highlighting the digital applications and software that deals with the shape grammar in this field. The methodology of this study adopted the analysis of studies that employed the shape grammar in the built heritage domain to determine the potential of these systems, to be presented as a documentation procedure for information management of built heritage.

Abstract In the last era of the digital revolution, architectural outputs with distinctive void formations appeared. The development in digital technologies, which adopts solid geometry in the formation of its interfaces. So the void became an integral part of the design at the level of three dimensions, to serves as a fourth dimension of architecture. By connecting architecture with the time, the limits of length, width, and height fade away and change from the limits of place to those of time, and this void shifts out from achieving the aesthetic needs to achieving functional and structural needs. The direct correlation of the architectural void with the process of forming the interfaces led it to be considered as a basic architectural formation unit, and in light of this,  the research problem was presented as (insufficient knowledge about the importance and role of the three-dimensional architectural void and the mechanisms of its formation in the interfaces of contemporary digital architecture as a void that generates or creates the design within the needs of the designer and the receiver ). The aim of the research came to reveal the concept of architectural void at the three-dimensional level, as well as revealing strategies and mechanisms for shaping the void in the interfaces. The research adopted the descriptive and analytical research methodology in proposing theoretical knowledge extracted from previous studies of building the theoretical framework for the geometry terms which contains  (strategies for forming digital void, characteristics of void in digital output, features of digital spatial structure),  and applying it on contemporary architectural models with a qualitative measure that is aimed at knowing the effect of terms on the selected samples and the percentage of their effectiveness in the characteristics of the digital output, and verifying the main research hypothesis which stipulated the adoption of the strategy of forming the digital void to combine the mechanisms of digital formation that is used to create void formation to meet the needs in contemporary architecture. The results indicated that the disappearance of the boundaries between the interior and exterior over time led to the use of the void in the formation of the building’s outer mass at the three-dimensional level so that the formation of the mass is based on that void which is called (design-generating void) and the structure which is created by the void called (the spatial structure), as its formation depended on "geometry" and its methods of formation.