Design Support for revisable buildings with focus on visualizing and simulating transformation capacity during initial design phase

Design Support for revisable buildings with focus on visualizing and simulating transformation capacity during initial design phase

Durmisevic, Elma
Berg, Marc C.
Atteya, Ussama

2017-06-21

Instead of designing buildings as static structures with one end of life option (demolition) circular buildings should be open upgradable platforms, transformable structures that can accommodate changing use and technical requirements across their whole Life Cycle. Rather than destroying buildings while adapting them to fit into new requirements, it should be possible to answer new requirements without demolition. In other words, in order to keep buildings in an economic loop through their whole life cycle building designs should guaranty high transformation capacity of buildings and their structure. Design of transformable buildings involves deliberation of spatial and technical aspects of future building and represents a multi-criteria optimization strategy. This strategy has impact on all design phase form transformable spatial configurations analyzed conceptual design phase moving towards optimization of technical solutions and their impact on transformation scenarios during final design phases. Transformation capacity of a building indicates the ability of a building design to deal with functional, technical or physical changes without generating material waste. A design with a higher transformation capacity implies lower environmental impact from a building configuration. Previous studies have described parameters that influence the transformation capacity and proposed models to assess a design accordingly. The right combination of parameters for each design decision making level impacting transformation capacity is being tested and used as a base for a software framework. Besides little remains known about how the impact of design decisions on the transformation capacity could be visualized and simulated. This paper will present, the conceptual framework and algorithms developed that calculate transformation capacity (relevant for the conceptual design phase) and provide an interactive feedback to the designer during initial design phase of the building. Because it is extremely beneficial to give immediate feedback to know how good each design decision is, the framework has been developed in dynamic extendable way which gives it the ability to understand and analyze data/models that come from different sources with different level of details. That offers high potential to easily integrate the framework with different technologies and use it during different project phases. The framework is developed using metaprogramming techniques to give high flexibility to define/modify its behavior in runtime which makes it efficient solution to wide range of complex problems. With a focus on the preliminary design stage, the framework was tested to validate its efficiency and effectiveness Expected outcomes of this research are insights about how visualization and simulation techniques could be employed using dynamic extendable framework to provide insight into the transformation capacity of a conceptual building design.

reversible buildings
virtual simulation
Transformation capacity
visualization
circular building
metaprogramming
automated integration

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:06db3f64-095d-4000-ba2e-60fa3a24df28

Conference proceedings

conference paper

(c) 2017 The Author(s)