Sometimes a vernacular design style is so consistent that it almost looks like it has been generated using a standard kit of parts and set of rules. Possible Palladian Villas looks at how Palladio used such a system to generate buildings, but I’ve always thought that modernist speculative buildings could be analysed as a pattern language or kit of parts in the same way…
This brief study, coded with Gemini 2.5, is part of an idea I’ve been playing with since I first studied the buildings of Hillbrow at university. Hillbrow’s high rise architecture is a very consistent vernacular, strongly inspired by Rex Martienssen’s house in Greenside. Martienssen was very influential on the generation of architects that studied at Wits in the 1940s and 50s, and they adapted the language of his house – facebrick facades, square boxed windows, plaster surrounds, flat roofs – to multi-storey buildings.
The generator below lets you select the height of the building and then randomly assembles a sequence of facade panels and stacks them on top of each other. About half the time, a small penthouse will be placed on the roof as well. The generator will also provide a text description below the image describing all the components. The ‘?’ button summarises all of the rules which are used to generate the image.