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[therahedwig]

So, there was a note in one of the fotf's that suggestions for architecture were sort of welcome. Most previous suggestions are about how to make things easier for fort-life or how to make things easier for modders (modders want control and modularity, who'd have thought that ). This suggestion will instead be a look at a set of rules for what we'd call vernacular architecture, aka peasant buildings, and how to utilize that for monumental and civic buildings as well as a reasonable historical progression sim.

There's a number of decisions within vernacular architecture that are just really environment tied, and are thus easy for DF to make some decisions about by itself without outside input.

Roofs

The first thing that I notice about dwarf fortress houses is that they're completely flat. Even in areas where it rains a lot.

Houses in rainy areas tend to have inclined roofs, to avoid the water from collecting and collapsing the house. There's many different variations you can have here. You can have a regular gabled roofs, which is what most houses have, or you can have rounded tower roofs or you can have any shape shown on the wikipedia page for roof-shapes.

The main concern with those roofs is that sawtooth and butterfly style roof may be very impractical for simple farmhouses because of...

Fireplaces

Fireplaces, in many simple houses, were placed at the center of the house, with a chimney hole at the top. Around that, seating and beds were placed (because warmth), and in the area between those and the walls is where there's walking room and then there's storage room and workplaces.

I didn't quite recall when fireplaces started being moved against the walls, but wikipedia suggests it happened as proper chimneys were invented.

• !FUN! with chimneys -- they are known to collect soot over time which can burst into flames unless cleaned.
• If you want to get technical, there's all sorts of trickery with updraft that governs the way chimneys are constructed. For example, connecting multiple fireplaces to the same chimney can lead to smoke coming out of one fireplace if it's not burning while the other is.
• Smoked meats and other foods were made by hanging these foods in the, er, smoke escape path
• Things should proly try to path through the chimney. Birds are known to get stuck in them, we have myths of jolly old saints climbing through them, and a daring thief might try to climb through one.

Other interesting fireplace related things are the Hypocaust central heating system, and ovens. The latter can be attached to a house or build outside of it, and I thought there was a bit of a link here between how cold the region was and whether an oven was build into the house, but I cannot find any references to this.

Walls

Walls are either stocky and made with an even width everywhere, or they have a skeletal structure to them. The latter is especially necessary in multi-level structures, as the skeleton tends to be made from a stronger and heavier material than the filling, allowing for building higher structures.

When a wall is defensive, they tend to be even width everywhere. When a wall is mostly structural, the skeletal structure is used, with the lowest levels having thick walls made of heavy and study materials, and higher levels having thin walls of lighter materials. Subsequent levels will also be less high and smaller in area, creating a staircase effect. You see this very clearly with the extremely high-build Gothic churches, but also with Pagodas, Pyramids, or the Pont-du-gard aquaduct.

Walls start out very short early on, and the longer a culture is around, the higher they try to build walls, because everything needs to be bigger and better than there was before. I would put a sensible limit somewhere at 5 to 7 z-levels high (Notre Dame's levels seem to be 14m and 13m for the 27~ m tall main building/hall). There's exceptions like the return to classical concepts such as Renaissance architecture. With the tower of Pisa for example, each level seems to be roughly the same height as the previous. This is past the cut-off point however.

Windows and Doors

Windows seem to have been invented after the neolithic era. None the less, if they exist, they tend to be very small in areas that have a lot of sunlight, and big in areas that have very little sunlight. The idea being that near the equator, the sun will be so bright that you need very surface to have enough light(while having too much surface will heat everything up), while near the poles, you need a lot of surface to get enough light (and heat is usually not an issue).

Within the context of DF, this can be used to consider whether or not a unwanted visitor is able to sneak into a house.

Areas where it storms a lot will have solid doors and shutters on the windows and doors to keep out the wind. Areas where it doesn't storm a lot might still usually have curtains or hides to keep out rain or sunlight. Solid materials aren't unusual in the latter regions either, but less necessary.

Places you're not supposed to get in or out will have bars installed in the windows. Fancy places might afford glass. Shooting holes are supposed to be really tiny, because only tiny arrows can go out.

Foundations

In wet areas, a foundation would need to be placed. These typically consist of wooden pillars driven into the ground until the ground is stable enough to hold whatever is going to be build on it. In very wet areas, the houses might just be build on top of pillars. Needless to say, these areas won't have very deep catacombs.

Materials

For most roofs, thatch is the cheapest and most convenient material. It is also terribly convenient for the dragon attacking a town. After that there's wood (shingles), which is a little bit more expensive, because that wood could have been used for other purposes. Then there's stone shingles(often slate was used for this), and clay roof tiles of all sorts and shapes.

For walls, you tend to see mudbrick and Dry-stone in dry regions, because it is easy to make. In wet regions, it's either drystone or a skeletal structure(post and lintel or more complex) from stone or wood, with the holes filled with wattle and daub, and later these would be filled with bricks.

In some rarer cases, there's houses made of turf/peat. They're most common in Iceland, but do exist outside of it.

After a while European cities started demanding that all houses were build of brick and stone after the so-manieth city destroying fire, which is an interesting way to showcase the history of a city.

So for simple living:

If it's dry, mudbrick or drystone for the walls. Wall-material, thatch or cloth for the (mostly flat) roofs.
If it's wet...

• If there's a lot of boulders, drystone walls.
• If there's a lot of high straight trees, wooden walls.
• If there's access to hardwoods such as oak, timber framing and wattle-and-daub.
• If there's none of that, thatch walls, or peat/turf.
• For roofs, thatch or peat, occasionally wood.
• Stone and clay roofs are for the rich or demanded by legislation.

City planning

Right now DF's towns use voronoi cells to represent roads. This is a pretty good approximation of what happened in reality where houses were build perpendicular to the important places in a town. So they'd be build around a castle or market or temple, or they'd be build perpendicular to an important road or harbour. The voronoi cells might be finetuned using this knowledge.

In the real world, cities with a lot of strict urban planning (such as a lot of roman cities) will show a grid structure in many cases. DF could also suggest some cultures just really have something with certain shapes, so they'd be using pentagons, or stars or swirls. Would it make sense? Not really, but it does make towns really distinct(Don't make it too common though, can get old really fast).

Ideally you'd want to allow a town to be able to switch from one type of layout to the next type for putting down new buildings, sometimes even a full urban renovation. The most well known real example of this is the renovation of Paris in the nineteenth century, which is quite a bit out of time-scope, but it is a good way to tell a story with the map of a city, and something that already sort of happens with the different house types put down by the different civs right now.


Unique creature adaptation

While builds are definitely made for people to live inside of them, unique creature adaptations would be mainly things like the size of doors and stairs, which feel like things you'd just want to keep abstracted away (unless we're talking about Giants).

I think that looking at how termites, bees, birds, bats and bunnies make their nests and burrows can give better ideas of exotic building types than specifically the size of the stairs.


Civic buildings

Monumental and civic buildings tend to be architected, which results in their floor plans being very symmetrical and following mathematical rhythms and proportions.

As well, these buildings tend to reuse floorplans, for example, a temple is build to specifications which makes it easier to just reuse floorplans. This also fits in with previous suggestions of people who'd like to have raw-defined modular elements to reuse in the architecture.

For temples and other religious buildings, it might be that a god has a special relationship with some types of geometry, which could then be used to determine the unique specifications of their religious buildings. For example, pyramids and the benben stone, but also the weird astronomical properties of stonehenge.

Other than that, these buildings are of course richly decorated. I'd personally suggest making sure their materials are using the layer stones, having come across castles made of native gold, and then occasionally having a z-level that's otherwise boring be in a different color to create a decorative effect. Or mosaics of simple geometric shapes in a different stone type. Or having some mild sinusoidal edges or some other cool mathematical pattern.

Historical progression

My general suggestion would be to start with neolithic building shapes and types for peasant houses. Select a specific ratio, geometric floor plan, a type of roof, and determine the materials from the surroundings. Peasant houses just didn't change much over time because it was just really expensive to do anything else but the traditional.

For civic and monumental structures, it would make sense that they'd start from what peasant buildings look like, and that a culture generates blueprints that get adjusted over time. So any meadhall could look the same as a big farmhouse in the year 5, but then at some point an architect is requested to design a better meadhall. The architect takes the previous blueprint and modifies it in some manner, so maybe they change the material, add a room, add new fancy architectural features. The civ will then gain this blueprint to have it be modified further by a next architect.

The blueprints of a civ should be available to the player in either of the building modes, if only for roleplay purposes. I am not sure if it is even possible for fort denizens to identify a room as loosely following certain blueprints, or if this is even desirable, as it could mess with creativity.

I'd also suggest having either an architectural knowledge branch, or to burden the engineering and mathematical branches with some architectural principles. Examples of things that can go in such a branch:

• Different rooftypes
• Hallways, courtyards, inside walls, multi-level rooms
• Different types of staircases, spiral stairs, palace stairs, ladders
• Different types of bridges
• Towers of all sorts, round towers, square towers, turrets
• Moats, artificial ponds.
• Different geometric shapes to build around.
• Fountains, hypocausts, chimneys, reservoirs, etc.
• Balconies.
• Arches of different shapes.
• Windows, glass windows, shutters, curtains, stained glass and gem windows, big windows, small windows, dormers.
• Flying buttresses, other reinforcements

This way, you can both simulate some kind of progression as well as cultural diffusion.

Finally, I'd suggest that outside of the raw modular-blueprint definition ability for modders, they'd also get the ability to define some basic rules for when the game has to generate a house from scratch. So an entity's preference for octogons with walls out of thatch with concave round roofs made of slate or something.

Overall, take a good look at the different wikipedia pages on architecture, they're really cohesive, and proly a bit more coherent than my generalizations. I think that the blueprint stuff will have to wait till the law and customs arc proper, but the selection of roofs, materials, ratios and basic floorplan-shapes should make it easy to differentiate between different cultures, which'll in turn make it more fun to look at the different towns.

If you feel you have another good generalization, weird building type, or if there's a specific kind of nuance my generalizations are missing, just say so, and I'll try to modify this wall of text here

[PlumpHelmetMan]

I love these, all of them. DF's architecture is an issue that's been bugging me for a while, could really use an upgrade.

[Azerty]

Good ideas.