Publisher's Synopsis
Style and stylistic change are central issues in the study of art and architecture. Over the past hundred years various important theories of style and its changes have been proposed by scholars in a diversity of disciplines, from the historian Heinrich Wolfflin to the economist Herbert Simon. In this book, a new and innovative approach is developed that looks not only at traditional questions about stylistic change but also sets up a formal model through which to analyse change and to structure innovation. Styles are defined in terms of rule-based, compositional systems called shape grammars. Shape grammars have been used widely in recent years to describe a variety of styles in architecture, landscape design, painting and the decorative arts. As this book demonstrates, stylistic change is characterised in terms of different transformations of the grammars that define styles.
