SIMULATION

Campus master plans are released every few years for developing and implementing its physical infrastructure. Open spaces, compactness, connectivity, greenness, and environmental impact have often been the focus on its framework. In particular, the effect of new building development on existing buildings’ occupant comfort and design intent is mostly ignored. Providing guidelines to retain existing users’ comfort for stakeholders involved in design decision making will result in improved design decisions. Hence, this research aims to provide a work methodology to mitigate the adverse effects of new buildings on existing buildings’ user comfort through a case study at Carleton University. The case study shows a methodology to retain the existing users’ comfort by analyzing Carleton University’s master plan on massing studies, occupant survey to understand their comfort needs, performance analysis of the impact of the new building on the existing building user comfort. The analysis reveals the key parameters to consider in design for occupants’ comfort. Finally, the research reinforces the generative design and the need for dynamic modeling in campus master plans to mitigate the negative implications of new development on occupants’ comfort.

Some architects struggle to choose the best form of how the building meets the ground and may benefit from a suggestion based on precedents. This paper presents a novel proof of concept workflow that enables machine learning (ML) to automatically classify three-dimensional (3D) prototypes with respect to formulating the most appropriate building/ground relationship. Here, ML, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), can ascertain the most appropriate relationship from a set of examples provided by trained architects. Moreover, the system classifies 3D prototypes of architectural precedent models based on a topological graph instead of 2D images. The system takes advantage of two primary technologies. The first is a software library that enhances the representation of 3D models through non-manifold topology (Topologic). The second is an end-to-end deep graph convolutional neural network (DGCNN). The experimental workflow in this paper consists of two stages. First, a generative simulation system for a 3D prototype of architectural precedents created a large synthetic database of building/ground relationships with numerous topological variations. This geometrical model then underwent conversion into semantically rich topological dual graphs. Second, the prototype architectural graphs were imported to the DGCNN model for graph classification. While using a unique data set prevents direct comparison, our experiments have shown that the proposed workflow achieves highly accurate results that align with DGCNN’s performance on benchmark graphs. This research demonstrates the potential of AI to help designers identify the topology of architectural solutions and place them within the most relevant architectural canons.

As technology advances, architects often employ innovative, non-standard shapes in their designs for the fast-growing number of high-rise buildings. Conversely, climate change is bringing about an increasing number of dangerous wind events causing damage to buildings and their surroundings. These factors further complicate the already difficult field of structural wind analysis. Current methods for calculating structural wind response, such as the Eurocode, do not provide methods for unconventional building shapes or, in the case of physical wind tunnel test and in-depth computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, they are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Thus, wind load analysis is often relegated to late in the design process. This paper presents the development of a computational method to analyze the effect of wind on the structural behavior of a 3D building model and optimize the external geometry to reduce those effects at an early design phase. It combines CFD, finite-element analysis (FEA), and an optimization algorithm in the popular parametric design tool, Grasshopper. This allows it to be used in an early design stage for performance-based design exploration in complement to the more traditional late-stage methods outlined above. After developing the method and testing the timeliness and precision of the CFD, and FEA portions on case study buildings, the tool was able to output an optimal geometry as well as a database of improved geometric options with their corresponding performance for the wind loading.

Radiant systems are an energy-efficient method for providing cooling to building occupants through active surfaces. To assess the impact of the radiant environment on occupants in space, we develop a ray-tracing simulation, which accounts for longwave radiation. Thermal radiation shares many characteristics with visible light, and thus is highly dependent on surface geometry. Much research effort has been dedicated to characterizing the behavior of visible light in the built environment and its impact on the human experience of space. However, longwave infrared radiation’s effect on the human perception of heat is still not well characterized or understood within the design community. In order to make the embodied effect of radiant surfaces’ geometry and configuration legible, we have developed a Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) simulation method, which is based on a ray-tracing technique. It accounts for the detailed geometry of the human body and its surrounding environment. We use a case study of a pavilion built with an envelope consisting of active cooling panels in Singapore. Using measured data for the surrounding surface temperatures in the pavilion, we explore the impact of both the active panels and the surrounding passive elements and thermal environment on a person’s radiant heat exchange in different postures. The reflectivity and emissivity values of different surfaces are taken into account, and the ray-tracing process allows for multiple-bounce simulation. The model accounts for both longwave and shortwave radiation, and the simulation results are compared with field measurements for validation. The results are expressed both numerically and as spatial radiant-heat-maps. These show a variation of up to 11°C in MRT across the space studied. Furthermore, a digital manikin is used to assess the impact of the radiant cooling panels across the human body. The results show a 10°C variation in radiant temperature perceived by different regions of the body in one position. The findings reveal a significant heterogeneity of radiant heat transfer that current analysis methods typically overlook for both architectural space and the geometry of the human body.

Floorplans often require considering numerous factors, from the layout size to cost, numeric attributes such as room sizes, and other intrinsic properties such as connectivity between visible regions. Representing these complex factors is challenging, but doing so in a representative and efficient way can enable new modes of design exploration. Existing image and graph-based approaches of floorplans’ representation often failed to consider low-level space semantics, structural features, and space utilization with respect to its future inhabitants, which are all the critical elements to analyze design layouts. We present a latent-space representation of floorplans using gated recurrent unit variational autoencoder (GRU-VAE), where floorplans are represented as attributed graphs (encoded with the abovementioned features). Two local search approaches are presented to efficiently explore the latent space for optimizing and generating new floorplans for the given environment. Semantic, structural, and visibility metrics are evaluated individually and as a combined objective for optimizations.