"American architects have masterminded dozens of suburban housing styles," writes Diana Budds to introduce a radical, technology-enabled departure from that suburban tradition.

One of the problems with that tradition, according to critics of the suburban model, is that the industrialization has "exerted the most influence over how much of the country lives today," according to Budds. That's where John Szot, a Brooklyn-based architect, comes in.1

[Szot's] proposal for introducing more diverse architecture into the suburbs is on view in Mass Market Alternatives, a new exhibition at the Boston gallery Pinkcomma. The project shows how algorithmic design could make it just as easy and cost-effective to build diverse suburban architecture as it is for developers to design and build boring tract houses.

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Szot’s formula for designing his houses involves using a computer program to generate floor plans and layouts, a style “recipe” revolving around materials and how the walls are joined to the roof, and some human intervention to sew up the design. The algorithm generates a box-shaped pattern of different colored blocks, which essentially becomes the floor plan. The program has settings that control the overall proportions of the pattern, like the height and width of each block (which eventually become rooms), the dimensions of the central hole (which is like a courtyard), and the maximum number of colored blocks in each design.

The program created 30 unique patterns for each of the four stylistic recipes. For example, the “precast” series is concrete and has a flat roof, the “patio” series features brick walls and a flat cantilevered roof, the “ranch” house has wood cladding and pitched roof, and the “loft” series has glass walls–for a total of 120 patterns. Each colored block is assigned a specific wall section from each recipe. Then a human designer intervenes and assigns a room function to each block, translating the randomly generated pattern into an actual house.

Like typical suburbs, which are composed of variations on a theme, these algorithmically designed houses share commonalities, but their expression is more diverse in shape and materials than most subdivisions.

The meat of Szot’s argument for more visually diverse architecture in a subdivision is that the houses would then appeal, stylistically, to different people. It’s an idealistic proposal. Architecture isn’t a great predictor of political beliefs. Take Philip Johnson, an influential architect and the progenitor of the modernist glass house. He was also a Nazi sympathizer. Szot is aware of this. “Because the project is focused on the link between cultural values and aesthetics, there is the ever-looming danger of suggesting a direct correlation between style and political affiliation,” he says. “Reality is far more subtle.”

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• 1. Source: Planetizen