Encoding Heritage: standard shape grammars for reconstructing traditional Mosul houses

Abstract Cultural heritage is of great importance and requires precision and methodology in its reconstruction. The traditional houses in the Old City of Mosul are primary examples of the city’s architectural heritage. It is characterized by its uniqueness and elegance, centered around an inner courtyard, and possesses a unique architectural identity and rich spatial composition. This identity has rapidly begun to fade due to urban transformations and ongoing conflicts in the region. This study applies standard shape grammar, a formal design language, to decode traditional Mosul houses, focusing on formal and syntactic (topological) relationships via Euclidean transformations. A sample of 12 traditional house plans was analyzed, yielding 22 generative rules across five design phases. To assess the validity of these rules, five new house designs and three hybrid designs were generated and evaluated using a structured questionnaire administered to 40 academic architects from the University of Mosul to examine the similarities and differences between the newly generated designs and the original houses. The results confirm that standard shape grammars can effectively encode, reproduce, and expand the design logic of traditional houses in Mosul, providing a methodological tool for reconstructing the spirit of heritage in a contemporary style.