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This is basically 'systems theory', which was all the rage in the 60s and 70s, and Christopher Alexander's work was linked to. There's a reason it didn't take off as much as expected - not because the overarching premise is wrong (that its possible to describe all things, even design, in a systematic way), but just that its incredibly difficult to the point of impossible for people to do so.

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Notes on the Synthesis of Form is a lot more systems-theoretic. The algorithm is more or less recursive min-cut partitioning which is now well-researched.

There is, however, a real logistical problem is getting the input requirements, massaging them to identical conceptual scope, and then connecting them together so you can perform said decomposition. That is a massive, massive bottleneck.

That's why it's so telling that Alexander abandoned the technique in his thesis in favour of using the building site itself, in effect, as a computational medium.

Right: that's what I was trying to imply. It's very appealing to think this way, but the only missing piece is how you actually do it.

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