Elegant Primitive Replacement

[mattd]

I am about to embark on making a system to replace all the primitives (maybe quads to start with) on an arbritrary object with another high res object. An example (although not exactly what I am doing here) would be to have a library of high res building facades that then get copied onto each face of a simple lowpoly building, including scale, rotation and shearing, ideally with stampable point attributes to alter the intersection of the panels accoring to the seed geometry.

I am looking for suggestions on what methods to try. I am a bit at a loss on how to get a primitive componets beyond the centroid and bounding box. A start may be to extract a axis via the face normal and the surface tangent, but I m not real sure how to get the tangent.

Any ideas? Or am I missing the obvious SOP or VOP that does all this for me?

Thanks

MD

edit: to clairify, I want to corner pin the bounding box of an object to a quad, with the 3rd dimension being an offset of the face itself along the normal