Workshop 6
Workshop 6
Shape grammar and Serial Art: Shared Roots
Shape grammar and Serial Art: Shared Roots
Tuesday 7 July 2026, 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Workshop Chairs
Mehrdad Hadighi, Penn State <mzh11@psu.edu>
Jose Pinto Duarte, Penn State <jxp400@psu.edu>
Jose Pinto Duarte, Penn State
Mehrdad Hadighi, Penn State
Jose Nuno Beirão, University of Lisbon
This workshop explores the deep historical and conceptual connections between serial works of art and the emergence of computational design in architecture. While much of today’s computational design discourse emphasizes technical development, this workshop seeks to revisit and foreground the foundational relationship between art and computation—an inquiry that defined the origins of the computational shape grammar field.
We begin with Claude Monet’s transformative serial paintings of “Haystacks” and “Rouen Cathedral” (1890–1893), which not only reshaped the language of modern art but also prefigured the serial logics later adopted by artists such as Mondrian, Albers, Warhol, and Schoenberg. These works inspired a trajectory of structured variation that led to and ran in parallel with developments in computational design, particularly the rise of shape grammars and data-driven design in the 1960s.
This workshop, in addition to being a skills-building session, is a platform for presentation and critical discussion, inviting contributions that examine the intersection of serial art and computational design. Participants will be presented with the foundations of serial art and shape grammar, and will engage in exercises toward a collective reflection on how these twin histories inform one another and what they reveal about the generative possibilities of seriality in contemporary practice.
We believe that the DCC’26 conference offers the ideal venue for this exploration, bringing together scholars, artists, computational experts, and designers interested in bridging past and future, art and computation.
Workshop Format
The workshop will be organized as a series of brief presentations, both theoretical and technical, interspersed with hands-on exercises to acquaint the participants with both the analytical and the generative roles of shape grammar in relation to serial works of art.
The Workshop will be open to all interested participants, limited by the logistics of facilities.
All attendees at the workshop need to register either as an addition to the DCC'26 conference registration at a cost of €27.50 (€25 + VAT), or if not registered for the conference at a cost of €55 (€50 + VAT). Please go the DCC'26 Registration page to add this workshop to your registration.