Image Schemas and Ontology in Architectural Rules

Architecture is said to be both a science as well as an art. As a first approximation, it is about construction and communication, about form and matter, and about rules and novelty. This suggests that there exists a set of architecture’s core elements, in particular regarding the meaning of rules, and a notion of meta-rule about composition choices in architecture. It follows that the act of creativity has a way to manifest itself into this domain via the described interplay between rules and meta-rules. In this work, we explore an ontology-driven discussion of architecture and propose a view on how to isolate and understand both architectural rules and architecture-based interactions across the ontological and image-schematic dimensions. The views emerging from architects and from theoreticians are discussed and the novelty provided by the image schema perspective is considered. The purpose is to study how these elements and their interactions can be modelled in ways that are suitable (at least in principle) for integration into formal systems, both in the area of design tools as well as of spatial reasoning and imagination. This, we believe, can link architectural creativity with formal representation in a new space for human-machine co-creativity. The paper is a first step in this direction