Step 1 - Generative Design Framework
For this homework I tried to implement some concepts from my real life experience. My father is also a civil engineer. Generally customers give him a land and he builds a few family houses on it. (I used two buildings in my homework.)
However, there are many decisions he has to make each time. First of all, there is a limit for the height and floor area. I simplified this as giving a fixed volume for the two buildings in total. So as the length or width of one building and spacing changes the length and width of other building also changes. Height works in the same way since volume is fixed.
- Design Decision 1
- Design Variables
- Building Heights
- Evaluators
- Total Cost
- Design Decision 2
- Design Variables
- Building 1 Length
- Evaluators
- Solar Value
- Design Decision 3
- Design Variables
- Space Between Buildings
- Evaluators
- Environmental Value
Step 2 - Generative Design Study
My first output is total cost including material and environmental together since I didn’t want to exceed 3 outputs and make it more complicated.
The other issue is the space between building because it both affects the green space on the land and more importantly the private space for the families. I had to simplify these two things under one parameter: “Environmental Value”.
According to http://urbanforestrynetwork.org/costs/cost benefit.htm#:~:text=It was estimated that investments,forests are not without costs. the value of a tree is 402$ in the long run and 20ft spacing between trees is ideal. So I divided the spacing parameter to 20 then assumed there are always 3 rows that’s why multiplied it by 3. Lastly, since one of the most important things is private space I multiplied this parameter by 10. So there is a big trade-off all the time. If you cut from spacing you can get better solar value and bigger meter-squares which customer like however spacing is important as well. Also cost will increase. However, if you give a too large spacing between buildings then they have to be smaller buildings and solar value will decrease.
Last parameter is solar value according the roof area. Since building dimensions change according to many parameters this parameter changes a lot too.
I will try to explain my flow logic step by step:
My changeable inputs were:
And fixed user inputs were:
After that I used a similar logic to lecture videos and created two buildings:
Then, I exploded them and got my areas separately:
Then I did final calculations and set outputs for the generative study:
Step 3 - Generative Design Study Results
Then I generated 50 generations to optimize my design. My main purpose was to maximize the solar value and environmental value whereas minimize the total cost.
I got my minimum cost in this case:
As expected space is huge. However in this case probably customer wont like it since buildings are so small and solar value is really low.
On the other hand, if we want to maximize solar value. The previous best case becomes the worst case. And the best case becomes:
Lastly, if want to maximize environmental value, the best case is:
where spacing is again high but the length of buildings are different than previous best cases.
Moreover, there is a linear relationship between cost and solar analysis since spacing affects both greatly.
For solar value vs environmental value thins are a bit complicated:
Lastly, if customer wants one of the homes bigger/longer things can really get much more complicated: As length of the first building decreases solar value for example non-linearly increases as it can be seen below.
