MuNa/docs/salingaros-form-language-prompt.md
Bruno Postle 6d962fbd57 Material from Nikos Salingaros
Docs used in the process of creating the narrative
2026-07-24 18:48:12 +01:00

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Nikos Salingaros' initial prompt:
I need to develop an architectural form language for Ecuador. The exercise
needs to locate open-source images of traditional buildings and urban spaces
and synthesize those into a design grammar. This grammar could then be
recombined within the constraints of the brief to produce a new design.
Consider the climate of Ecuador, which is temperate all year around with a
fixed amount of rainfall. The form language should choose from the entire
spectrum of buildings dating back to indigenous wooden sheds with conical
roofs, to stone pre-Columbian pyramids, to early Spanish colonial wooden
structures, to highly baroque later Spanish colonial buildings that adapted to
the local climate and materials. Pay special attention to the large variety of
colors used for centuries in Ecuadorian architecture. Also recover the
different ornamental traditions in Ecuadorian and neighboring Latin American
architecture. What can you propose for this project?
Nikos Salingaros' follow-up prompt:
You have the right idea. Specialize on the Quito climate and forget the rest,
since this is where the project is to be built. But draw from all other regions
for the form language. For the copyrighted images, we are not going to copy
them and publish them, but will only use them as references for the developed
Ecuadorian form language. What I need from you is a detailed document to use
together with other instructions in a future prompt to an LLM to produce images
of the proposed new building. Other elements of the prompt are going to include
the brief constraints, spatial chassis, and other specifics. The climate is
fixed at Quito sierra. Color and ornament are not going to be specified, since
we will ask for a variety of projects to be generated, each one with a distinct
choice for color and ornament to cover traditional Ecuadorian architecture.
Then a human will choose the most beautiful from among those. Since this form
language document will be used as part of a prompt, the structured grammar
document is more useful than generated images. Those will be generated after
the LLM creates the verbal descriptions from the prompt constraints.