Reconsidering Bovill's method for determining the fractal geometry of architecture

Throughout the 1970s the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot developed an argument which proposes that natural systems frequently possess characteristic geometric or visual complexity over multiple scales of observation. This argument lead to the formulation of fractal geometry and it was central to the rise of the sciences of non-linearity and complexity . During the 1990s, researchers Michael Batty and Paul Longley, Biller Hiller and Carl Bovill developed this concept in relation to, respectively, the city, urban neighborhoods and individual buildings. More recently, architectural scholars and building scientists have suggested that such models might be used to determine quantitative measures of visual complexity in architectural form. In parallel, a range of computational tools have also been developed to assist in the determination of the characteristic visual complexity of architecture. At the heart of such approaches is a set of rules developed by Bovill for analyzing buildings. However, despite its growing importance, the assumptions, arguments and the evidence he uses to support this case. A series of alternative variations on Bovill's method are then proposed and discussed.