Introduction

Abstract

Just as the grammar of music consists of harmony, counterpoint and form (sonata, rondo, etc.) which describe the structure of a composition and poetry has its rondeau, ballad, virelai and sonnet, so spatial structures, whether crystalline, architectural or choreographic, have their grammar, which consists of such parameters as symmetry, proportion, connectivity, valency, stability. Space is not a passive vacuum; it has properties which constrain as well as enhance the structures which inhabit it. Design science comprises this grammar in the broadest sense, dealing with those parameters which are common to all spatial structures. That this grammar did not become obvious earlier is probably due to the fact that crystallographers, architects, mathematicians, visual artists and choreographers have worked on such different scales and in such varied idioms that they found it hard to communicate.¹