UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Stuckeman School in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State will host a lecture by design and computation theorist George Stiny, “Shapes of Imagination,” on March 18 at 4 p.m. in the Stuckeman Jury Space.
The lecture will be based on Stiny’s book, “Shapes of Imagination: Calculating in Coleridge’s Magical Realm” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022), where he explores intersections of visual calculating and shape grammars with design and art. Introduced by Stiny and James Gips, shape grammars are a class of production systems used to generate computational geometric shapes.
Stiny’s work shows design as not only functional problem-solving but as a cultural and philosophical idea for human experiences. He calculates in an embedded-fuse cycle, a system that is developed using embedded hardware and software to go through the process of analysis, design and implementation, which makes computers a special series of shape grammars for design. These systems are scalable, reliable and fast in performance.
In his lecture, Stiny will illustrate how imagination and shape grammars are at the center of art and architecture.
“I go from Alberti to Siza and from AI and parametric design to the magic of shape grammars,” Stiny said. “The goal is pure delight.”
Stiny is a professor in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after 15 years of teaching at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Stiny has also taught at the University of Sydney, the Royal College of Art (London) and the Open University.
He holds a doctorate in engineering from UCLA. Stiny is a member of the editorial boards of Planning and Design: Environment and Planning B and Languages of Design.
Stiny has written several other books, including “Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape and Shape Grammars (Birkhäuser, 1975); “Shape: Talking about Seeing and Doing (MIT, 2006); and with Gips, “Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts (University of California, 1978).