Finding Housing Genotypes by Graph Theory: An Investigation into Malay Houses

Abstract

Finding cultural characteristics of housing has been a subject in many disciplines. Most of their approaches, however, were qualitative rather than quantitative since even those houses with a similar style exhibit a wide variety of morphological solutions with varying shapes and sizes. As a result, researchers tended to focus on materials, decorations and layouts that are relatively easy to analyse. In recent decades, many attempts have been made to quantify built environment. Space syntax and shape grammar are two representative theories that radically systemised this approach. They highlighted, however, only one side of the reality; space syntax on spatial configuration and shape grammar on formal composition; thus could not suggest the holistic understanding of it. To overcome this limit, this research suggests a new graph representation where the information of both form and space are retained. What is the cultural DNA of Malay houses? We often try to relate this kind of question to traditional houses, but DNA is something that transcends time by transferring itself from an old generation to a new. To find this persisting genotypical element, modern apartment floor plans were converted to the new graph representation and then analysed to filter out the most common spatial elements in them. Through the interpretation of these commonalities, culture-specific properties from the past were revealed.