Midtown Theater
Fall 2019 | Design + Research Studio I
The Midtown Theater, located in Midtown Atlanta on 14th Street, is an extension of the Woodruff Arts Center. The theater building infills an urban site, which faces a a busy street and has path connection to the Arts Center on the north side of the site.
The theater plan has been constructed by a series of rules covering categories, such as axes, program, and room modules. An initial parti is all it takes to define the basic structure of the theater building. Room modules are defined separately and placed into the bounding grids of the parti. In total there are about 200 rules that can be used to construct theater plans. Many of those rules are variants of a base rule type, which allows for many different combinations.
Location: Atlanta, GA
Shape Machine
These theater plans were generated using a prototype tool called Shape Machine. This tool incorporates shape grammar into visual rules that can be edited within the drawing environment.
The process below shows how the design generation works. Starting with an initial parti, Shape Machine generates axes and insertion points. The programmatic elements are modular, and they are added into the built up framework of axes. The end result is a high fidelity theater plan solution.
Click on the drawings to take a closer look at the results.
