101–110 of 110 posts
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=sha...
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Concrete is manual 3D printing from 100+ years ago. =) I've seen a concrete 3d printer, but it doesn't look like it would be structural. i.e. not sure how you would print around full lengths of rebar?
These guys are building small houses with a thing that prints in layers just like a home 3D printer, using mortar instead of plastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzS2FZoB-I It looks like there's manually placed metal mesh for reinforcement. Dunno what the quality's like, but it's there. It does seem like it would be tricky to scale to structures larger than the practical footprint of their printer, but maybe the…
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> building costs beyond just material use Yep. The "optimized" floorplans would be an order of magnitude more expensive to build than the original. I mean, drywall alone would take a lot more time with all the cuts, mudding and sanding more joints. The thought of framing out these walls makes my head hurt.
And even if you had a building process that made circular/n-gon-based rooms practical, furnishing and laying out those rooms would be awkward. See the problems people have furnishing dome houses. I'd least envy the people trying to arrange shelving in the library... Still, interesting. I'd be curious to see results as he adds more practical constrains.
Dome home: most rooms will have 2 or 3 flat walls with 1 or 2 right-angle corners, so put rectangular furniture there.
Classrooms and library at the proposed school: the size of the room dwarfs the size of the furniture, so the problem is much like complaining that the letter "O" can not be made from square pixels. Somehow, we get our letter "O".
The idea was to have a function, for each office worker in the office that would grade the place they are sitting in (distance to toilet, printer, lighting, space around desk, etc.) and have algorithm evolve open space plans to have best overall satisfaction and also make sure that there are no places that have very low score.
Now, this algorithm could only take existing floor plan, it could only place furniture on existing floor with existing walls but it was still nice excercise.
I'd like to make my point that any kind of over-optimization of one or more aspects will put one of the biggest virtues of truly good and functional architecture at risk: being adaptive for a wide variety of future changes (use, program, technology, climate, energy resources, partitioning, shrinking, expanding, etc.).
The actual task of designing a building is to find the right balance in a myriad of parameters, which sometimes create synergies (think sunlight and heating), but often are just one step away from undesirable impacts (think sunlight and overheating). Flexibility in architecture always results out of generous tolerances and robustness - which is always in danger to be eliminated by optimization for limited scenarios.
Also many aspects of the design logically derive from each other: if I plan a school with natural ventilation, it'd be probably a good idea to have windows in two sides of the room, that can exchange the whole air of the room in a 5min break. If I opt for a mechanical ventilation this advantage would be gone and the disadvantages of not having a more compact cubature would override and result in a completely different layout.
While I appreciate all kind of tools that give me an insight into complex interdependencies (how do floorplans with optimized A,B,C look like?) i think that good architectural solutions need humans to make a tailor-made decision based on a bigger picture of our society that has the chance to be valid for some decades(centuries?). Good architects choose to rely on typologies that evolved from history for this difficult task and transform them when needed.
I'd be curious if the approach of OP could be used backwards as a software based analysis what details make successful typologies actually successful.
On a side note: It's pretty interesting that the resulting floorplans of OP are somewhat similar to the traditional arabic city structure (google traditional damascus city center and zoom into the still intact quartiers).
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Would you be able to provide links to modern structures built with the methods you're describing or research about them? Does this conservative design resemble something like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, or is that the wrong way to think about it?
Here's one modern example: https://pagethink.com/v/project-detail/Wiss-Janney-Elstner-A... It really means massiveness and stability, in order to have an acceptable margin of safety. One aspect of the theory is the notion of a line of thrust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_thrust Arch dams might be the only type of "contemporary" looking structure that is habitually made in this way out of unreinforced concret…
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I took this as an initial exploration of genetic algorithms for architecture. As such, the idea is more interesting than the specific parameters and weights chosen here. You'll notice as you scroll down that this article _does_ vary the parameters and weights. For instance, the one that optimizes for windows tends to create interior courtyards. I could imagine adding parameters and weights for thresholds, areas for c…
The resulting designs could be fed through a variety of simulators, environmental, social, construction feasibility, etc. One could also use a supervised classifier and have people rank the resulting designs. They can know what they like, but not why.
You would probably get more realistic buildings due to the different constraints on them.
I don't think the results should be taken to serious, but I imagine it serious fun to see them. xD
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Would you be able to provide links to modern structures built with the methods you're describing or research about them? Does this conservative design resemble something like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, or is that the wrong way to think about it?
Here's one modern example: https://pagethink.com/v/project-detail/Wiss-Janney-Elstner-A... It really means massiveness and stability, in order to have an acceptable margin of safety. One aspect of the theory is the notion of a line of thrust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_thrust Arch dams might be the only type of "contemporary" looking structure that is habitually made in this way out of unreinforced concret…
These types of exercises are useful not to find their solutions, but to reveal the shortcomings of the model used to create them - and our thus our own mental models! Building design is older than humankind, and there's tens of millenia worth of reasons why they are the way they are. But those reasons aren't always clear. Essentially modern floor plan design is the output of a black-box machine (human) learning algor…
Elegantly put. Thanks. I was struggling without success to make a similar observation.