GENERATING A DESIGN AUTOMATION FOR FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDING: DEVELOPING PLUG IN

Abstract

Designers, architects, and students face many problems in finding the optimum zoning or exploring different alternatives during early design stages, which consumes time and energy. To solve this problem, a computer editing tool will be an added value that helps users at this stage. The optimization of functional relationship is very important as many factors should be considered such as orientation; vertical and horizontal relationship; areas, view, building regulations, opening to wall ratio, form-to-form relationship, spaces proportions, circulation, and other related issues. In computer generative design, recent research has reached a goal to generate functional relationship in residential buildings and others, by using spatial relationship plug in, such as ‘SYNTCATIC v-2.7’ used in grasshopper software. This plug-in considers many of the mentioned factors, however it neglects other needed factors, such as vertical circulation and corridors. This paper aims to develop and optimize functional relationships in residential buildings, through developing an existing plug in and considering some neglected factors, especially the horizontal circulation. The existing grasshopper plug in ‘SYNTCATIC v-2.7’ will be developed, after analyzing its missing and ignored factors, to be able to help architects to take decisions for zoning in early design stages. Then this developed plug in will be tested and applied in a case study for verification. As an outcome the developed plug in will be able to facilitate architects’ work, since it allows them to test various alternatives easily at the beginning of the design, to be able to select the optimum one. This enhanced plug in will consider especially horizontal circulation in residential buildings, which was neglected in the existing plug in.