Applying generative modeling procedure to explore architectural forms

Abstract

Computer generated 3D forms using generative procedures have matured in the last decade and now considered as a tangible approach for realizing architectural design ideas. As fascinating as the approach might be, it is still lacking actual application in the early architectural design process. There are many reasons for this, among them: it has many implications over the architectural design process mainly the practicality of design during the conceptual design stage, it is cumbersome to develop construction drawings for complex architectural forms, and the necessity for producing conceptual designs quickly in less time as design requirements and decisions are constantly being changed. This paper initially reports on a practical development of a computer program which generates architectural massing designs based on integrating forms generation technique in a design scheme. The influence for this development was inspired by Spirolaterals technique used in generating complex 3D architectural forms that are based on parametric shape configuration. The development has three goals: to review the principles for constructing generative forms in the conceptual design stage using simple CAD tools, to assist in the production of design schemes based on a few basic shapes and rules, and to explore 3D forms finding and generation without the need to write a complicated computer program that are difficult to produce by hand. The development resulted in generating an interesting number of 3D compositions. The author applied this technique to experiment during the production of a design scheme. The paper hence describes the current development of ArchiGen tool to produces generative 3D forms utilizing ArchiCAD • © GDL programming language. The tool is embedded within ArchiCAD for generating 3D shapes. One of the main features of this implementation is that users are able to sketch 2D shapes and the tool will deform its three dimensional generation. Moreover, the user being able to abstract the architectural character from the resulting complex 3D shapes. This development extends current related work by allowing the designer to load shapes into ArchiGen which acts as vocabulary of shapes for a design scheme constraints. It is intended from this work to inspire future work focusing on using generative tools in the early conceptual design stages.