Surface Symmetries:The

Smith House Revisited

Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

international journal of architectural computing issue 04, volume 08 485

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited
Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

Abstract
This work proposes the use of partial order lattices along with
representational schemes to account for patterns of ambiguity and
emergence in the description of designs.The complexity of such designs
is viewed as an aggregation of spatial layers that can all be decomposed
by the subgroup relations of the symmetry of the configuration. At the
end, this methodology points to a combinatorial approach that
generates visual prototypes for future use in design synthesis. Here,
Meiers work is just a case study that validates the group theoretical
approach.

486
1. Introduction
A fascinating aspect of certain classes of architectural works is their ability
to escape easy interpretations based upon existing formal tools.This is
especially true for several architecture works of the modern movement
that feature asymmetrical arrangements and diverse kinds of complexity. A
new look at existing formal tools can perform the task, if applied, though
differently. Currently formal analyses using group theoretical tools focus on
repetitive designs that show immediately their recursive structure. It is
suggested here that complex designs can still be described and analyzed in
a group theoretical manner. Some first steps towards the extension of the
tools of group theory to explain such designs have already been taken [1],
[2], [3].This work builds upon these methodological approaches and
proposes a model that investigates whether the combination of existing
group theoretical formalisms with appropriate systems of representation
can cast light in the analysis of such designs. More specifically the work
proposes the use of partial order lattices along with representational
schemes to account for patterns of ambiguity and emergence in the
description of such designs.
The object of analysis has been polemically selected here to be the
Richard Meiers Smith House, a design that clearly exemplifies formal
qualities of late modernism architecture such as abstraction, layering,
complexity, depth, collage and so on, all aesthetic categories appearing
impenetrable to a systematic and rigorous analysis using existing group
theoretical formal methods.
The paper is divided into four sections: In section 1, the introduction
and motivation of the work are given. In section 2, the formal model of
notational representation and subsymmetry analysis is described in detail. In
section 3, an application of this methodology is given for the Smith House
including visual computations capturing sub-symmetry relations for all parts
of the house and a complete catalogue of recombination of all symmetry
parts of the house. In section 4, the discussion is given on the degree to
which the symmetry decompositions can support visually the established
discourse on the house and the possibility of using such formal tools in
CAD applications.

2. Formal Model
The formal analysis model proposed in this work requires a system of
representational conventions to codify the aspects of design that are of
interest to the analysis and a group theoretic formalism to parse the design
to identical parts.The system of representational conventions discussed
below under the heading 2.1. Architectural notations, is built upon three
features of architectural representation including abstraction, projection and
weight. Other aspects of representation conventions are omitted.The group
theoretic formalism discussed here under the heading 2.2 Order, relies on

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 487

subsymmetry analysis and uses partial order lattices as the primary mode of
pictorial representation. A brief discussion of these two characteristics of
the formal model follows below.

2.1. Architectural Notations

A three-dimensional model or a two-dimensional drawing typically provides
an abstracted representation of an imaginary or a real architectural object.
This visual representation does not depend solely on formal similarities.This
representation is not a mapping of an objects complete form but a mapping
of certain privileged or relevant aspects. Depending on the number of
features being deleted from the original or alternatively being added or
transformed in the mapping a level of abstraction is then arbitrarily defined.
Here abstraction is used entirely in terms of essential and accidental
properties [4].An abstracted version in any mapping is the one that keeps
certain characteristics of the original object while dropping others.All such
different levels of representation allow the analysis to describe shapes at
different generative stages and establish links which are not immediately
available to the viewer. In this sense plans, sketches, and working drawings are
all scaled analogs and highly abstract notational scores that condense visual
and non-visual amounts of information into a codified language of symbols.
A second aspect of architectural representation is its ability to describe
architectural space through the deployment of depthless drawings.Among the
various techniques of projection including plans, sections and elevations and
systems of lines linking them all one to another, a specific composite projection
technique is quite unique in architecture and not in other engineering fields.
This technique combines essentially orthographic and affine transformations
and has the unique feature to represent abstract space both visually and
metrically.This type of composite projection, also known as an axonometric
paraline and oblique paraline projection has attracted the interest of twentieth
century architects and theorists because seeing in oblique views is essential for
depth perception [5]. It is significant that such composite axonometric
projections foregrounded two functions initially thought as one: the
axonometric as a representational device and/or as a conceptual device.The
former is progressively enriched by the methods of multimedia presentations,
the latter is able to support the communication of spatial qualities of an
architectural object during the process of conceptualization. In all cases the
exploitation of the fundamental ambiguity of the axonometric projection has
been the discourse of much architectural theory in the twentieth century and
it is suggested here that this should be the primary mode of representation to
adequately describe and analyze the architecture works of that period.
The third aspect of architectural representation discussed here is its
ability to represent materiality.A pen stroke has a width. Lines are of
different thickness.Typically these widths and weights of the lines refer to
what is represented and worked upon a set of conventions widely shared
and understood. Different types of conventions and assumptions often give

488 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

the clues about what is represented and weights distinguish formal attributes
from physical properties. Shapes made up of basic elements and weights
answer to the Vitruvian categories: physical properties being included in
firmness, functional properties in commodity, and spatial properties in delight.
This particular understanding of weights as a characteristic of representation
itself is taken here as a powerful construct for formal analysis. In this
view, weights suggest a different kind of projection directly alluding to
transparency, a key feature of the twentieth century architecture, whereas
the three-dimensional qualities of the design are illustrated through the
weighting of lines [6].Varying degrees of transparency and opacity can be
strategically deployed to hierarchically differentiate preselected conditions
important to the development of the work.
These three aspects of representation, suggested here, a) shape; b) weight,
and c) projection provide indeed a powerful notational armature to begin to
describe architectural designs: Shape captures the geometrical characteristic
of the architecture object described and is defined by sets of lines.Weight
denotes the physical characteristics of the architectural object such as opacity,
translucency, or transparency and their relation with the observer and is
defined as sets of weighted lines in the representation; three types of
notations of lines are used here: Solid, thin, and dotted. Projection denotes the
specific orthographical or oblique mapping of the model of the architecture
object upon the plane of depiction. Other aspects of architecture
representation routinely used in architecture notation are omitted here.
Still, these three aspects of representation can be combined in various
ways to create a large number of possible notational systems for
architecture design. In principle, there can be a large number of such
notational models that privilege diverse aspects of the design and capture
some, but of course not all, conventions characterizing a design. Here, three
levels of notational languages are suggested as a minimum for formal analysis.
The first level of notation, called here the architectonic level, is the level
that approximates in some way the original notation used for the language
of the actual design model into its closest geometric representation.The
notation privileges functional elements such as walls, slabs, columns, and
beams, walled furniture, handrails, and openings of various kinds such as
windows, doors, stairwells, chimneys, and so forth.The second level of
notation, called here the spatial level, privileges space divisions and
corresponding openings in these boundaries, and discards all other
information.This level essentially picks up planes that function as walls and
slabs and so on and the connections between them and their interface-
ventilation, light, sight and so forth.At this level, a spatial model that emerges
is a spatial decomposition of the building with geometric shapes that bound
the space.The third level of notation, called here the diagrammatic level,
foregrounds underlying, emergent boundaries of space and discards all
connections between them.This level of notation, closely related to the parti
of a design, the geometrical diagram or pattern that emerges when all details

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 489

have been dropped out, is the most abstract version of the model and
functions as a scaffolding of the design.An example of the architectural
notation exemplifying the features of shape, weight, and projection along with
the three levels of abstraction is given in Figure 1.

Figure 1. An example of an
architectural notational language in
three different scales of detail

2.2. Order
The similarity relation permits overlap between elements of the set,
whereas the equivalence relation separates the set into disjoint classes.
Equivalence relations are represented by trees and similarity relations
are represented by lattices [7]. Here the key operator that parses the
representations is the partial order relation defined by the symmetry group
that describes the maximum subsymmetries of the configuration.The
fundamental significance of symmetry arises here from its capacity to reveal
two opposing aspects of form: transformation (change) and conservation
(invariance).That which is conserved during a change is an invariant; the set
of transformations which keeps something invariant is its symmetry group.
The set of elements and their structural relationships forming the complete
system are conserved as a single whole and this order identifies all the
nested parts in any configuration that have a group theoretical relationship
to the overall group of the configuration.
The key idea is that spatial representations of complex objects can be
understood as layered compositions of simpler parts and these parts can all
be related through symmetry values from group theory.These values can be
structured as a partial order lattice that pictorially presents the symmetry
structure of any spatial configuration; the number and qualities of the
symmetry subgroups found in any given configuration provide the maximum
number of layers that can be found in a spatial configuration; for example, in
any spatial arrangement that is based on the structure of the rectangle, the
maximum number of layers and spatial constructs that can be build upon
those is five because this is the number of symmetry subgroups of the
rectangle.Typically, Hasse diagrams are used to represent such order and
show the nested relations of the subgroups in graph [7].
An example of a graph of the symmetry group of the rectangle is given
in Figure 2.The complete group of the rectangle with four symmetries is on
top, three subgroups with two symmetries are in the middle row and the
single group consisting of only the identity symmetry completes the graph
in the lower row.

490 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

Figure 2. A graph showing the
partial order of the symmetry group
of the rectangle

3. Applications
Several initial departure points can be conjured to test the model; the 1967
Exhibition New York Five is as good as any, and very productive too .The
NY5 exhibition on the early work of five New York City architects, namely
Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and
Richard Meier, and the subsequent book Five Architects published in 1972,
has indelibly stamped the course of the history of modern architecture of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first century [8].The explicit reference
of NY5 to the work of Le Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s and its ironic
allegiance to a pure form of architectural modernism made the exhibition
pivotal for the evolution of architecture thought and language in the
subsequent years and produced a critical benchmark against which other
architecture theories of postmodernism, deconstructivism, neomodersnism
and others have referred, critiqued or subverted [9]. Among this early work
of NY5 the Meiers buildings were closer from all on the modernist
aesthetic of the Corbusian form and in fact even the later buildings that
Meier produced since then have all remained truest to this aesthetic.This
work traces the history and logic of the evolution of Meiers early language
and its direct relationships to spatial and formal investigations of early-
twentieth-century modernism as well as its direct reciprocal relationships
with the rest of the NY5 languages.The departure for this inquiry of such
centrifugal relationships between rules and products, between notation and
performance, for the purposes of this work is Richard Meiers Smith House,
an early pivotal work, an acknowledged forerunner and embodiment of the
full repertory of Meier formal strategies and language [10]. In the same way
that Richard Meiers work constitutes a hyper-refinement of the modernist
imagery that has been inspired not by machines but by other architecture
that was inspired by machines and especially Le Corbusier [11], the group
formalism that can describe Meiers architecture constitutes a hyper-refined
construction that relies on specific representations and mappings that
foreground internal complex relationships of the structure itself, i.e. the
symmetry subgroups and supergroups of any given spatial configuration. A
succinct account of the discourse developed about the house and its critical
role in the formation of contemporary architecture discourse is given
elsewhere [12].

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 491

3.1.White Geometries
The Smith House is in Darren, Connecticut, and it is situated on a 6000 m2
site overlooking Long Island Sound from the Connecticut coast.The house
was built during 196567 on a site literally adjacent to the water and it
was designed for a family with two children.The entrance area and master
bedroom are on the middle floor.The lower level is for dining, kitchen,
laundry and domestic help. Both the living and dining areas open directly to
outdoor terraces.The top floor contains childrens bedrooms, guest-room
and library-play.The house is finally topped by an outdoor roof deck. An
axonometric view of a three-dimensional digital model of the house is
shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Axonometric view of the

Smith House

The house itself appears to be a hyphenation of two canonical

structures: the Citrohan house and the Domino house [13].The Citrohan
zone is a series of closed cellular spaces and the Dom-ino zone is leveled
as three platforms within a single volume enclosed by a glass skin. Meier
investigates a language of oppositions of a denied dialectic between the total
transparency of the panoramic faade and the solid compartment of the
entrance faade.The handling of the layer stratification of the building
parallels the post-Cubist conception of spatial relationships. On this basis,
we can conceive the spatial arrangement of the house as the development
of combinations and assemblages of lines, planes and volumes, independent
of what the given elements may represent.

3.2. Rewind
The analysis proposed here proceeds along visual computations that are
all based upon representations that capture some, but of course not all,
conventions characterizing a design.The key idea behind these computations is
that they are designed to decompose the house in sets of basic elements that
are then recomposed to redescribe the house or reflected upon to consider
other possibilities and help interpret the basic assumptions about the system

492 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

itself.All pictorial descriptions below use the features of shape, weight, and
projection as well as the three levels of abstraction discussed in the previous
section in the description of the formal model.The architectonic representation
for all three floors is shown in Figure 4, the spatial representation is shown in
Figure 5 and the diagrammatic representation in Figure 6.
The initial shape that starts the subsymmetry computation is the three-
dimensional diagrammatic version of the model of the Smith house.The
symmetry partition of the house occurs at this level because this is the
simplest possible schema for the design; the spatial correspondences in the
diagrammatic level are easy to identify and compute.The nice feature of the
model us is that the symmetry decomposition of the diagrammatic model is
directly mapped to the equivalent decompositions in the spatial and the
architectonic levels. In this sense spatial relations in these other two
notational levels that would be very hard to pick up or even impossible, are
now are extracted in a straightforward way.The key idea here behind these

Figure 4. Architectonic level. Left:

Lower floor. Middle: Middle floor. Right:
Upper floor

Figure 5. Spatial level. Left: Lower

floor. Middle: Middle floor. Right:
Upper floor

Figure 6. Diagrammatic level. Left:

Lower floor. Middle: Middle floor. Right:
Upper floor

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 493

mapping between notations (and the shape rules and their reversals that do
such mappings) is that the decomposition and recomposition of the design
helps to evaluate basic assumptions about the design and the system itself.All
these visual computations and subsymmetry relations are nicely captured in
partial order lattices that pictorially present the subsymmetry structure of
the underlying spatial configuration of the rectangle.Two different ordered
relations for the first and the second floor of the house are shown in
Figure 7 and 8 respectively.The spatial notation is omitted for clarity of
Figure 7. Partial order lattice of the
first floor. Upper: Diagrammatic;
Lower: Architectonic

494 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

Figure 8. Partial order
lattice of the second floor.
Upper: Diagrammatic;
Lower: Architectonic

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 495

representation.A complete presentation requires the lattices for all three
floors and for all three levels.The details are left to the interested reader.

3.3. Pause
The partial order lattices foreground the wall as the major compositional
element that structures the design. Meier himself has attested to his
preference to spatial elements rather than construction elements and
especially his predilection for the wall to be a homogeneous plane [14].
This basic unit of the composition of the Smith house, the wall, has been
defined so far in a series of successive subtractions of features from a given
representation that approximates the original pictorial language of the house.
A close examination of the instances of the wall in the house and their
spatial relations suggests compositional processes such as parameterization,
dematerialization, deformation, defragmentation and alternatively the design
of an overall framework for a critical description and interpretation of the
house.This suggestion is based on a series of experiments upon the
representational elements of the house and their consistent typological
reduction in the planar unit of the wall.The subtractive process is paused
here and the basic unit is approached constructively as a geometrical object
that is subject to a given set of rules.The hypothesis is that the basic unit of
the Smith house and all its variations comprise a subset of a specific set of
topological transformations of rectangular prisms and correspondingly of the
full vocabulary of the NY5 architecture.The initial function of the wall is to
enclose space, so openings appear as punched out holes or as cut-outs.
Through voids, missing walls are virtual elements or space elements treated
as solids.A vertical wall is a wall whose height is greater than the distance
from floor to floor.A horizontal wall usually serves as interior partition.Wall
and block together constitute a hybrid unit. Here, the frame-infill walls
comprise all of the above types too: the window wall open frame, and the
glazed curtain wall.There are three fundamental instances of geometric
cuboids: a) massive block-space volume; b) opaque wall-opening; and c)
surface-plane.All these bodies can be parameterized through density and
permeability to create binary oppositions: opacitytransparency, solidvoid,
and in-between or hybrid entities. Oppositions emerge including
blockspace, wallopening, surfaceplane. Parametric procedures generate
geometric elements in this particular design style.The parameterization of
the block produces variations in dimensions, density and edge condition.
Interesting cases emerge:A massive piece of wall or block can generate any
of the most unlike elements: chimney, closet, recess, threshold, staircase, and
so on by subtractive operations.A solid opaque wall can be subject to
operations of filtration, permeability or translucence.A solid transparent wall
may instantiate either a glazed curtain wall or a window wall. Finally, a virtual
wall as an abstract plane is then defined by its edge condition.A line on the
plan may mark the separation of insideoutside, but it can also signify the
edge of the volume, a change in material or level, or the presence of

496 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

something above or beyond.A combination of a solid - opaque wall and a
transparent glazed wall may yield a translucent wall.The combination of the
solid wall with space volume yields to a hybrid wall.
The frontal wall of the house is a triplet of planar and volumetric elements
imbued with materiality and permeability.The glazing element incorporates
open frames of wood| steel with an infill of glass.The trabeated element plays
the role of concentric shell which acts as another filter. In-between is found an
appended volume of space.The lateral window facade is layered same as the
frontal one. Hybrid units are layered in parallel. Here, all the enclosing walls are
hybrid. In the middle, there is the medial wall to create a vertical layer for the
promenade architecturale and to structure deep and shallow space.
The basic mechanism to abstract the elements of the house and
foreground their relationships as they are translated from level to level has
been put in place.What is interesting in this process is the re-working of the
compositional machinery of the design and the exploration of the possibilities
that this system allows.This section starts the whole project from scratch and
explores the formal possibilities in the bridging of these languages that are
constructed in-between these consecutive notational levels. For the purposes
of this analysis, the formal representation of the wall is taken to be a
geometric cuboid parametrically defined in terms of characteristics including
height, length, thickness, and degrees of permeability, density and openness.
This primitive is a mathematical object that is described in a finite rectangular
Cartesian system.Variations of this single schema may give rise to a range of
essential elements used in the vocabulary of Meiers architecture and of
course a great deal of other modern architecture works.
If the cuboid and its parametric variations provide the basic vocabulary of
the diagrammatic representation of the house its gradual fragmentation
provides the basic vocabulary for the spatial representation of the house.The
types of the fragmentation have to clearly foreground the relationship of the
part-to-whole and should clearly evoke the fact that the parts belong in larger
entities that they have been detached from.The specific decomposition of
the three-dimensional cuboid considered here is based on a decomposition
of the two-dimensional square into specific gridiron systems. By de-fragmenting
the modules of vertical planes to determine the classes of openings in a plane,
we can easily extract from this set the subset Meier uses.Among all possible
gridiron systems the 3 3 was chosen here as the most generous for
architectural purposes.The basic cellular grid and its cycles of permutations
under the symmetry group of the square are shown in figure 9.
The method of counting of non-equivalent configurations based on a
given permutation group of vertices of a geometric shape has been given by

Figure 9.The cycles of permutations

for the 3 3 cell

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 497

Polya in his theorem of counting [15]. Nice applications of this theorem in
architectural design can be found in other sources [16], [17].The core of
the theorem is that any shape can be represented as a function of the cycles
of permutations of vertices fr that are induced under the symmetry group
of the shape.The sum of all the cycles of permutations and their products
divided to the sum of permutations of the symmetry group of the figure
provides the cycle index of the figure.This cycle index provides the
blueprint for the enumeration of all the possible subsets. More specifically,
for a figure inventory x + y where x and y represent the quantities that will
be enumerated, its expansion according to the theorem is given in Eqn (1).

fr = xr + yr (1)

If we substitute the figure inventory into the cycle index by replacing a

cycle fk with xk + yk, and expand the cycle index in powers of x and y, the
resulting coefficient of xrys is the number of distinct ways of configuring the
x cells and y cells with respect to the permutation group.The equation can
be solved in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the multinomial
theorem shown in Eqn (2).
n! r s
( x + y )n = xy (2)
r + s = n !s!
r

In the specific case here for the 9-cell grid, the computation of the
equations (1) and (2) for a figure inventory x + y, whereas x means white
squares and y black ones, provides a total of 102 distinct non-equivalent
configurations.These configurations are symmetric regarding the quantities x
and y.The 102 n-cell configurations for x + y 9 are shown in Figure 10.
The exciting part of this enumeration is that it provides the complete
set of all possible configurations of all binary systems embedded upon a
given grid and therefore it provides a systematic framework to explore all
the possibilities implicit in the system. It is clear for example, that some of
these configurations have been used in many different circumstances in the
design of the Smith house; these configurations consist of arrangements of
black and white cells that denote respectively open and closed spaces or
some hybrid in-between spaces.The reworking of this material provides a
rich palette to visit not only the composition of the house itself but to
contemplate on the possible configurations that are not used in this specific
case but are used in other cases either by Meier himself or any other of the
NY architects. A sample of these rules and the ways they apply to the
abstract configurations computed above is given in Figure 11.

3.4. Fast-Forward
The subsymmetry analysis parses the design in layered identical parts that
foreground qualities that are hidden within the overall structure of the
design. Here a somewhat different approach is taken and the focus switches

498 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

Figure 10.The 102 configurations of
a nine square-grid

on the juxtaposition of all these correspondences, one with another, at the

architectonic level. More specifically the goal here is to examine all partial
group theoretic descriptions of the Smith house one by one and in doing so
foreground specific relationships that a straightforward application of group
theory wouldnt do.
The lattice of the symmetry group of the rectangle consists of five
symmetry subgroups.These subgroups can be combined one with another

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 499

Figure 11. Correlation of some of
the non-equivalent configurations of a
3 3 cellular grid and Meiers planar
units

to comprise a set of 25 or thirty-two possible design worlds that are

differentiated one another with respect to the number of elements that
belong in each subset.The number of combinations of symmetry elements r
among a set of s elements is given in Eqn(3).

S!
(3)
r ! (s r )!

For example for a set s comprised of five elements the number of

subsets r comprised of three elements is given in Eqn(4).

5!
3! (5 3)!
(4)
The complete list for all subsets comprised of five elements including
dihedral symmetries (D), vertical reflections (V), horizontal reflections (H),
half-turn rotations (S) and identity transformations (C) is given in Table 1.

500 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

Table 1. Complete listing of n-ary set Recombination List #
recombination of subsets of Null 1
symmetry group of the rectangle Unary D,V, S, H, C 5
Binary DV, DS, DH, DC,VS,VH,VC, SH, SC, HC 10
Ternary DVS, DVH, DVC, DSH, DSC, DHC,VSH,VSC,VHC, SHC 10
Quaternary DVSH, DVSC, DVHC, DSHC,VSHC 5
Quinary DVSHC 1

Furthermore all these design worlds, a total of thirty-two sets, can be

individually augmented with three representations each corresponding to
the three floors of the house, making then a total of ninety-six drawings
including of course the empty set. And still, all these drawings can be further
given in three-different versions corresponding to the architectonic, spatial
and diagrammatic notation bringing the total number of representations to
two hundred and eighty-eight.This recombinant vision exhausts all possible
ways that the parts of the house can be combined and should therefore be
able to capture all theoretical statements on symmetry that have been said
or could be said about the house.The thirty two sets of subsymmetries of
the dihedral group are depicted in Figure 12.

Figure 12. A complete list of the

diagrams of all combinations of
symmetry parts

A nice outcome of this constructive combinatorial approach is its ability

to capture and reflect on existing debates on formal analysis of the house.
For example Frampton has suggested that the theme of simultaneous
frontal and rotational development of composition pervades Meier
workand as a matter of fact the whole work of the NY5 architects that
Meier was a part ofbut it is not resolved in Meiers work. Rosemarie
Bletter critiques Frampton that his categories of frontality and rotation are
in the end too broadly defined and too general to help precise analysis and
that the applications of the two categories in the analysis of buildings are
somewhat non-systematic [18]. She further claims that Framptons notion of

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 501

frontality is applied in different ways for each of the NY5 architects: in
Hejduks projects it is used to refer to overall massing, in Graves work it is
used to refer to the entrance while in Eisenmans and Meiers work it is
used to describe the interior gridding of the space. Such arguments and
similar ones can be nicely captured and discussed using the group theoretic
combinatorial approach suggested here.The ten possible ternary models of
the house foregrounding characteristics such as rotary movement (S),
collage elements (C) and so on, are all given in Figure 13.

Figure 13.The group theoretic

ternary models of the Smith house.
First to last row: DVS; DVH; DVC;
DSH; DSC

502 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

Figure 13(continued).The group
theoretic ternary models of the Smith
house. First to last row: f) DHC;VSH;
VSC;VHC; SHC

All these models are interpreted here using two distinct descriptive
systems: facts and values, or forms and functions [7]. Functions are suggested
by values such as reflection, rotation, identity and so on, and a relation
represents the mapping of one system to another with logical variables 0 and 1.
The models juxtapose the qualities one against the other and examine how
the presence of the one clarifies or obscures the significance and role of the
other. For example the recombinant model DSC in Figure 13 foregrounds
the individual values of parallel layering (D), rotary movement (S) and collage
elements (C). Clearly, the house is partitioned in terms of frontal symmetries-
in the original model the (H) symmetries.The corresponding partition to the

Surface Symmetries:The Smith House Revisited 503

side symmetries, in the model the (V) symmetries, shows clearly the part of
the design that is subject to these transformations.The embedded
relationship of the rotations to the two systems of reflection is a byproduct.
Furthermore the relatively dense compartition of the design given the
dihedral, rotational and identity transformations suggests that the house is
conditioned in a great extent by both orthogonal axes and not just one.
The DSC model, and in fact several other subsets of the building can help
investigate questions and criticisms like that.These properties are clearly
foregrounded in the representation suggested here.Three issues are
important here: a) the isolation and foregrounding of specific subsets of
symmetries happens in the diagrammatic level and all lessons learned transfer
then to the architectonic level; b) all partial and incomplete correspondences
that may be observed in the Smith House are captured by the group theoretic
decomposition of the parti of the house, that is the rectangle and therefore
the five symmetry subgroups and the ninety-six subsets of the complete set
of transformations of the rectangle; and c) the interpretation of a set of
chosen recombinant parts suggests a constructive understanding of the
design and provides a view on how these recombinants can be used toward
synthesis as a visual prototype to start with.

4. Discussion
A major motivation of this work is that there is a correspondence between
the evolution of architectural languages and the formalisms that can be used
to describe, interpret and evaluate them. Classical modern buildings can be
and have already successfully been described by group theoretical techniques.
In the same way, Richard Meiers work constitutes a hyper-refinement of the
modernist imagery that has been inspired not by machines but by other
architecture that was inspired by machines.The group formalism that can
describe Meiers architecture relies on precise representations and mappings
that foreground internal complex relationships of the structure itself, i.e. the
symmetry subgroups and supergroups of any configuration.
It is clear that the complexity suggested in the reading of the Smith house
could be contextualized within a wider set of designs with similar properties and
especially the corpus of the NY5 [19]. Other houses could have been selected to
test the formal method suggested here. Still, it is argued here that among all such
candidates, the Smith House stands out as the best candidate.The house has a
long legacy: Frampton has nominated the Smith House as a classic and selected
the young Meier as the one architect out of five who knows history the most
and learns from it [20]. Rykwert has asserted that the house is a classic case of
an architectural typology that uses a formal vocabulary whose elements are all
abstracted from the repertory of early modernism and juxtaposed back as a
collage [21]. Jencks has asserted that Meier uses a mixture of traditional forms
of modernist architecture [22].And still many other key discourses have been
suggested to include the themes of compositional grid and patterned frames
[11], the discipline of the Domino and Citrohan structures [23], and Mies

504 Edouard Din and Athanassios Economou

aesthetic of rhythmic linear elements [10]. Clearly, Meiers language, iconography,
and elemental categories force comparison and differentiation with the work of
other architects and at the same time call attention for a precise analysis in itself.
At the end, this research points to a series of other extensions and domains.
These extensions generally fall into two categories; a) on the improvement of the
system itself; and b) on the interpretative capabilities it affords for the
construction and evaluation of critical languages of design.

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