George Stiny is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 design and computation theorist. He co-created the concept of shape grammar

Shape grammar

Shape grammars in computation are a specific class of production systems that generate geometric shapes. Typically, Shapes are 2- or 3-dimensional, thus shape grammars are a way to study 2- and 3-dimensional languages. Shape grammars have been studied in particular in computer-aided architectural...

s.

Stiny was educated at MIT and UCLA. He has taught at the University of Sydney, the Royal College of Art (London), and the Open University. He was faculty at UCLA for fifteen years before joining the MIT Department of Architecture in 1996.

Published works

• Stiny, G. & Gips, J. (1972). Shape grammars and the generative specification of painting and sculpture. In Information Processing 71, pp. 1460–1465. North-Holland Publishing Company. link to article
• Stiny, G. (1978). Algorithmic Aesthetics. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520034679
• Stiny, G. (1980). Introduction to shape and shape grammars. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 7(3), 343-351.
• Stiny, G. (2008). Shape. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262693677
• The grammar of paradise: on the generation of Mughul gardens
• The Algebras of Design

External links

• George Stiny home page at MIT Architecture
• Full text of Algorithmic Aesthetics book
• Interview with Stiny, at MIT Libraries