Step 1:
Structural Design:
- Material strength vs. weight
- Material stiffness vs. weight
- Volume required to achieve certain stiffness or strength
Some combination of stiffness and strength required, and potentially minimal volume taken up to maximize suitable building space
Considering fracture toughness vs. strength, stiffness, and weight
Resistance to fire/heat vs all of the above
Aerodynamics?
To optimize material choice, these categories would need to be weighted, and analyzed
Economics:
- Up front cost of construction vs. cost of maintenance
- Cost of heating and cooling
- Value of property vs. cost of construction
- Up front cost vs. longevity of building
Quality of Space:
- Number of rooms with views vs. total building square footage
- Solar heating vs. direct sun exposure
- Skylit rooms
- Unobstructed view of something desirable
- Window area vs. construction cost
- Window area vs. fire resistance
- View quality vs structural soundness (earthquake resistance maybe)
Step 2:
I decided I wanted to do a study of views vs. insolation. I thought it might be interesting to explore the tradeoffs between some measure of quality of living and a measure of environmental and cost consideration (energy use). This is just one place where the dual goals of sustainability and building performance might conflict (there are many instances where they align).
The two scatterplots both show an inverse relation between insolation and view quality! This means that the outputs are actually in some type of opposition.
Perhaps one would use these scatterplots (with more data points) to determine the maximum view qualities a city planner could hope to obtain while staying within a certain energy consumption (insolation) bracket.
