Regenerating traditional houses facades of old Mosul city by Shape Grammar

Abstract

The urban facades of the traditional dwellings in the old city of Mosul are part of a dense structure of the homogeneous urban fabric. These facades are characterized by a distinctive architectural style that gives a sense of place and local identity. Their design depends on the organization of architectural elements in syntactic characteristics, which are restricted by topological, geometrical, and dimensional relationships that responded to social, technical, and environmental requirements. Those restrictions made a special style in the local architecture that reveals the social and cultural influences of the residents. Shape Grammar is an effective system in analyzing the architecture structures because it combines both morphological and dimensional values In the analyzing. Shape Grammar regulates the architectural elements and their relationships in specific rules to conserve these traditional facades and their values. In the conservation of built heritage, organizing these elements and defining their rules is essential. This paper seeks to derive the standard and parameters of shape grammar to regenerate the damaged traditional facades of Mosul Old City as a case study (especially after the great damage as a result of the last war in 2017), by determining the rules that restrict the relationships and the transformations in the structures of these elements in the virtual reconstruction of urban heritage according to principles of traditional architecture. The research analyzes and classifies the elements of the case study to obtain its shape grammar that enables the regenerating of these facades in the same architectural language and characteristics.