Topology Based Catalogue Exploration Framework for Identifying View-Enhanced Tower Designs

In collaboration with The Visualization and Data Analytics (ViDA) lab at the NYU School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Harish Doraiswamy, Nivan Ferreira, Marcos Lage, Hut T. Vo, Luc Wilson, Heidi Werner, Muchan Park, Cláudio Silva

Abstract

There is a growing expectation for high performance design in architecture
which negotiates between the requirements of the client
and the physical constraints of a building site. Clients for building
projects often challenge architects to maximize view quality
since it can significantly increase real estate value. To pursue this
challenge, architects typically move through several design revision
cycles to identify a set of design options which satisfy these view
quality expectations in coordination with other goals of the project.
However, reviewing a large quantity of design options within the
practical time constraints is challenging due to the limitations of
existing tools for view performance evaluation. These challenges
include flexibility in the definition of view quality and the ability
to handle the expensive computation involved in assessing both the
view quality and the exploration of a large number of possible design
options. To address these challenges, we propose a catalogue based
framework that enables the interactive exploration of conceptual
building design options based on adjustable view preferences.
We achieve this by integrating a flexible mechanism to combine
different view measures with an indexing scheme for view computation
that achieves high performance and precision. Furthermore,
the combined view measures are then used to model the building
design space as a high dimensional scalar function. The topological
features of this function are then used as candidate building designs.
Finally, we propose an interactive design catalogue for the exploration
of potential building designs based on the given view preferences.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through
two use case scenarios to assess view potential and explore conceptual
building designs on sites with high development likelihood in
Manhattan, New York City.