Skyscraper - Facade Variation

Skyscraper #4 - The Final

"When designing a building, you should find such an idea within, that makes you tremble before it." - Jože Plečnik

Reality Check

Gossamer Skyscraper - #3

Skyscraper Internals

Experimenting with the skyscraper core, floors... trying to create some interesting living spaces within the structure. Would you work in an office like that? Is it mandatory nowadays to integrate "green" gardens with trees some 100m above the ground?

Refining the Genotype

...of my genetic algorithm prototype, in order to derive more interesting shapes, actually resembling architecture.

Skyscraper #1

It surely would be hell to build, but I assume that the irregular exoskeleton may prove to be a wind-cheating design. Of course, this is merely a speculation which should be put to the test.

Skyscraper - Getting There!

Well, in the end, it’d have to be architecture. I decided to go for the skyscraper design, since the skyscraper has been the paramount challenge of architecture for more than a hundred years, and it still is.

So in the weeks ahead, I shall design – based on the stuff accumulated so far – a nice, somewhat surreal, skyscraper. What could be more fun?

Preparing for a Skyscraper

Simple outisde, complex inside

The Basic Voronoi 3D Dilemma: Chaos and Order

I feel somewhat philosophical today: is design, including architecture, anything but finding the balance between chaos and order?

Inside

Flat or Curved?

Spotted: Beijing Water Cube

The Olympic Games opened today and I couldn't care less. I would not like to offend anyone, but I simply can't see any reason to watch sports on TV; after working most days sitting in front a computer monitor, I prefer to engage in some real sport activities like hiking or biking in the surrounding hills or mountains.

However, there is something interesting for me about these Games, and of course it's The Water Cube.

I was stunned when I first saw the photos of the building - it was under construction and it was after my discovery of Voronoi diagrams. Mixed feelings flew through my veins. On the one hand, I was happy that something so similar to Voronoi was actually being built, and on such a large scale. On the other hand, I knew that most of the people, when they'd see my work, would say "Oh, you're doing a kind of bubble-building, just something like the Beijing Water Cube. Not very innovative."

Let's put the question of originality aside. The Water Cube is a fascinating building, it really looks like a bunch of bubbles, but it's geometry isn't based on Voronoi diagrams. I learned that the geometry behind is Weaire-Phelan structure.

Well, Voronoi, Steiner trees, Weaire-Phelan... it all looks the same - bubbles.

It's really brave to actually build that kind of architecture. I wonder how it will age. It's certainly a peak of today's engineering, maybe even one of the wonders of the new world; pitty it surely won't last as long as the old ones. They don't do these kind of wonders anymore :-)

My first Voronoi Genetic-house

This is the first example of all the stuff put together: my C# "interactive breeder" software, Qhull and Sketchup (for final eye-candy-type visualisation). As I pointed out in the previous post, some restrictions were made in deploying the input Voronoi sites. Most of them are derived using the interactive genetic algorithm; however, I sometimes force the grid distribution of the input sites, which can be nicely seen in this model - there are some areas of rectangular regularity. While this can be seen as a cheating the evolutionary process, it is important to me to get insight in the rules of morphogenesis (genotype -> phenotype conversion). To be an architecture, the "genetic-house" must exhibit some architectural features - leveled floor of internal spaces (or rooms), for example, is perhaps the most important feature. This "house" (I suppose you wouldn't like to live it it) is the major milestone in my project. I'll do a lot of them in the days ahead to get some feeling about what works and what doesn't. Then I have to refine the genotype definition as well as phenotype development - morphogenesis. I am somewhat sorry that I won't have the time to implement all the ideas continually emerging at every step of my research.

The Interactive Voronoi

Today I merged my "interactive breeder", previously working only with cubic prisms, with 3d Voronoi structures. Wow, it took a long time to come to this point, I'm getting somewhere... There are still some problems: 3d Voronoi structures don't look like architecture yet (see the first picture on the left). One would, um, imagine that a structure should have some horizontal planes in order to be an architecture. People expect to have some horizontal places to move, dwell, work... in their houses. I decided to merge two vocabularies to achieve that: the final structure would be generated by the Voronoi algorithm, but the points would be artificialy encouraged to take positions in cubic grids (see the last picture on the left). Was I cheating a bit here? Yes. The (politically?) correct way would be to define another fitness function which would favor the subjects with as many horizontal planes as possible. Maybe I'll do that some time. At this time, I'm exploring the interactive genetic algorithms (with a human selector). As you surely know, the concept of time exists because everything cannot happen at once :-) I think I'll explore the following question in one of the future posts: to what extent the traits of a subject are defined by the evolutionary process itself and to what extent by other forces; enviroment, for example. A shark and a lion are both predators, but they look quite different. The evolution process is crucial in species development, but the environment takes a part of paramount importance, too.

Spotted: Shape Evolution

Very interesting thesis of Oréstes Choúchoulas exploring the Genetic Algoritms (GA) in architecture. While the author concludes that "..the genetic algorithm is not working as efficiently as expected..." (well, nobody promised that it would be easy...), the paper gives lots of valuable insight in the field of GA and its usage in architecture.

The Interactive Approach to Genetic Architecture

As discussed in Evolutionary Computing Applications in Architecture design, the genetic algorithm's fitness function could take into consideration three different aspects of architecture (structural integrity, functionality and aesthetic). After I put a lot of thought into it, I made two important decisions. 1. In my research, I will limit the fitness function to only one of the aspects. While the ultimate genetic algorithm for architectural design could and should include all three aspects, I strongly believe that each aspect should be studied first in a partial experiment. Combining different (Vitruvius') aspects in GA before each of them would be fully studied and understood, would only mess things up. 2. I decided that I should choose the aesthetic value aspect. It's the key aspect which differentiates an architecture from a building. GA searching the optimal structure could proove very efficient, however, it falls more in the field of structural engineering. I wrote a program which displays 9 "subjects" in a 3x3 matrix. The subjects are simple cubic compositions, made of randomly sized and randomly positioned cubic prisms. The users selects some of those prisms in order to favor them in the evolutionary process (selection, recombination, mutation...). To emphasize the inheritance trace of specific genotype codes (and phenotype features), I colored the subjects at the begining of the evolution. After each new generation is produced, one may observe how the genotype-phenotype properties are passed to the subjects of the next generation. I was somewhat disapointed that I won't be able to demonstrate "real" genetic algorithm processing with huge populations (several thousands subjects) and lots of (thousands of) generations. I even risk that the evolutional principle won't be achieved in such a small population (only 9 subjects!) and within relatively small number of generations (limited to duration of user interaction). But at this moment this is the only solution. The two decisions described earlier in this post, are certainly the right ones and I should proceed in this way.