Lira Nikolovska
Design and Computation program

Final Project: Implementation of
Glarner's shape grammar in AutoLISP

Shape grammar by T Knight, 1987

Fritz Glarner (1899 - 1972)
was a Swiss painter who, influenced
by Pete Mondrian, became member of
De Stijl movement. His work is
divided in 5 stages, and each of
the stages is manifested through
use of "rules".

The implementation that I made
enables interactive re-creation of Glarner-like
painting. The process is combination of user
and machine determined steps.

Click on the image to access the lisp file
Load menu glarner.mnu and glarner.mnl
View code here

1. Draw canvas
Type glarner on the prompt.

2. Divide canvas in vertical
and horizontal direction

Type dividecanvas on the prompt.

Select between horizontal division,
vertical division and done.

Click inside the canvas.

3. Apply one of the 6 wedge rules and
select small wedging on short/long side

Type wedge_rules on the prompt.

Select between wedge rules 1-6 ,
and short or long small wedge.

The program will make all the divisions.

4. Paint the canvas

Glarner used white, 4 shades of gray,
the 3 primary colors (yellow, red and blue)
and black in his paintings.

Here I create a list with these colors and
the program randomly assigns a color to each
rectangle.

Type paint on the prompt.

The program will paint the rectangles.