Urban Suburb
Urban Suburb: Creating Suburban Living Quality in an Urban Environment
Humphrey Yang. Advisor: Maw Chang Yen
Conventionally, architectural design is a top-down process. Designers start with a high level strategy for site planning and procedurally narrow down to the building itself and the spaces. In this project, I composed a computational framework to design buildings in a bottom-up manner. Leveraging the fuzzy controller, designers will first define a set of rules that govern the growth of building blocks (each corresponding to a room of an apartment), then the algorithm will populate spaces on the site accordingly. In this scenario, architects lose direct control over the designs but have the liberty to explore unforeseen design opportunities.
Site
Bad quality of space due to high density. Houses are placed without taking openings into account, results in bad ventilation,poor sunlight and view.
Issue
In an urban developments, we sacrifice spatial quality for higher housing density. Yet, with computation to augment and inform design decisions, we can satisfy both objectives at the same time. As a result, we bring suburban housing qualities into urban sites
Algorithm Overview
This framework is flexible and has high customizability. Architects can swap in/out the exchangeable components to alter the growth behavior of the building blocks. In addition to the factors mentioned here, users can also supplement the design with new genes to fit to a specific context.
Housing Program
Houses around this urban area can be categorized into three types, each considered a combination of equally-sized spatial units with different functions.
Quality Factors
Space quality is defined as the combination of these factors. The fuzzy controller is used to blend these rules together into an evaluator.
At each iteration, the algorithm will evaluate the site to find an optimal (defined by the spatial quality) position to place a new cell.
Building massing with Urban Suburb.
