Intended users
Architects / Engineers for their designs as well as real estate developers for planning an investment in a space.
These would be the designers and developers contributing to create a higher percentage of feasible adaptive reuse projects in the market by designing and investing in buildings that can remain useful and have a longer lifespan - beyond the typical 40-50 year lifespan and into the 90-100+ year range. To do that, there would need to be a proactive approach to designing buildings with more flexible floor plans while maintaining a high ratio of rentable / useful space and following the general guidelines of building codes.
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
By reusing more of the existing building stock, adaptive reuse projects reduce the carbon emissions and have shorter construction periods compared to ground-up projects.
Something that has come up in recent times is the interest in converting office space to residential type spaces. However, in the past, buildings were typically not designed to be reused and converted into other types of spaces so the default path was to demolish them. Therefore, for designing future buildings, it would be nice to have a tool that could indicate how flexible a building layout is between what could be considered a typical office layout as well as a typical residential apartment tower.
Inputs
- Width and length for panelization of floor plan —> these would be the columns
- Geometry inputs (profile radius, rotation etc) for tower
- Window to wall ratio
- Floor to floor height
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
To get floor layout:
- Constraining the panel lengths and widths to around 20-50 feet for typical structural bay sizes
To get useful floor area:
- For every x increase in square footage, an additional bathroom will be added, which removes from the amount of useful space:
- Metric: useful floor area = gross floor area - non-useful spaces (bathrooms, circulation etc.)
To get window access:
- Window access zone created with the offset from the edge by 1 bay depth
- Daylighting zone created with offset from the edge by 10-20 feet, or about 1/3 the window height to cover the typical depth in a room that can benefit from daylighting, as well as have adequate depth for residential spaces
- Metric: ratio of floor area with a view to overall area
- Metric: ratio of daylit area to overall area
To get flexibility score, sum of:
- Window access ratio
- Range remap useful floor area value against the min and max floor areas to see where it lands on scale of 0-1
Outputs
Optimized building designs that:
- Maximizes useful floor area
- Maximizes views to outside
- Has a high “flexibility score”
- Minimizes cost