My optimization scheme optimizes for (1) buildings that met the floor area requirement and (2) buildings that received the least cumulative insolation over the course of the year. I did this in order to (theoretically) save on air conditioning costs for the building, especially during the increasingly hot Bay Area summers. I varied the number of sides of the building and the building’s height, while maintaining constant twist and building width parameters. The optimization scheme in Excel averages rankings for floor area requirement and insolation to select the top three, but my Dynamo optimization scheme eliminates all buildings that do not meet the floor area requirement and then selects the best of that sublist with respect to insolation.
Original building form:
Recommended building form:
Excel-based optimization:
Dynamo Program:
This first section evaluates the total floor area and total insolation of the building forms.
The second section filters results by the floor area requirement in Dynamo and retrieves the item with minimum insolation, while also transferring the results to an Excel sheet.
The third section recreates and panelizes the optimal building form.
