A pair of grids and a pair of volumes are employed to generate architectural forms. This experiment commences with two groups generators, each group consists of a grid and a volume which are twisted with each other. Inside each group, the floors are generated on the grid and within the volume.
An optimization process is to arrange positions (in vertical direction) of floors such that the total area of floors are maximum and all floors have a proper height. Since the floors are associated with both the grid and the twisted volume, generating all floors without conflict by rule-based method is not available. Instead, an optimization process starting from random initialization is more reasonable in this situation. Besides, such process is better at generating alternative solutions than rule-based methods. Both “generate and test” and simulated annealing are tried for optimization. The convergence speed of the methods are similar in this experiment, both takes hundreds to one thousand iterations to get satisfying results.
Programmed in Java
January 2012
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