Biological in appearance, intriguing in character and wildly irrational
July 31, 2018 4:00 PM   Subscribe

Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways, etc.
posted by Foci for Analysis (20 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
These are awesome! Definitely look like anatomical organs, like a spleen or a lobe of a lung.

I notice some odd results that wouldn’t be ideal in real life, but I suspect that’s just an optimization parameter issue. I also suspect that construction costs would make this impractical, since rectilinear shapes are more cost effective.

Students and staff probably might prefer the cognitively easier to manage rectangles, even if it meant they had to walk a few hundred feet more each day, unless it were super well implemented.

Nevertheless, it’s very cool. Now I’m imagining a building designed specifically to mimic the layout of a lung, or liver, or spleen...

“Yes, Ms. Blake’s homeroom is in the right lung, lower lobe. Just follow the right bronchus, third bronchiole down. You can’t miss it!”
posted by darkstar at 4:25 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


These plans would drive structural and mechanical engineers crazy.
posted by Flashman at 4:31 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Almost like desire paths but for buildings.
posted by madajb at 4:47 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


It certainly highlights how you need to be clear about ALL practical requirements from the get-go. Windowless classrooms. A round gymnasium that ignores the layout of most athletic fields/courts. A stage cut off from any seating area for an audience.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 5:00 PM on July 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


> These plans would drive structural and mechanical engineers crazy.

> It certainly highlights how you need to be clear about ALL practical requirements from the get-go.

Yes...but it's clear that the creator is very aware of the limitations of this approach, and views it as an interesting experiment more than something that will generate plans to go out and build:

The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc.

...

The results were biological in appearance, intriguing in character and wildly irrational in practice.

...

I have very mixed feelings about this project. It was my first large generative design project, and I think the underlying ideas have a lot of potential. The work required for all the various steps is probably overly complicated. By not obeying any laws of architecture or design, it also made the results very hard to evaluate. I hope it elicits some ideas in the reader about the future of generativity and design.

(Emphasis mine if that's not obvious.)
posted by dubitable at 5:15 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


What happens if a year later, requirements change? How do you economically reconfigure this organic, probably non interchangeable part arrangement?
posted by njohnson23 at 5:19 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Ah, well then you make all the rooms modular, so they can be shifted around as needed!


*architects’ heads asplode*
posted by darkstar at 5:28 PM on July 31, 2018


I hope the exterior doors are assumed and unlabeled, or else nobody’s getting into these babies. Or out...
posted by ejs at 5:44 PM on July 31, 2018


I have spent decades as both a map/architecture geek and a tabletop RPG player. These seem like an awesome way to lay out non-human-designed buildings (or dungeons or spaceships or whatever).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:14 PM on July 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


This is really neat!
posted by Wretch729 at 6:28 PM on July 31, 2018


As a teacher, I like the look and layout of the building itself, but not-square(ish) classrooms can be a real pain.
posted by oddman at 6:42 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well, it looks like I'm playing Dwarf Fortress tonight.
posted by flyingfox at 6:48 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I would be interested to see what these would look like if they added the constraint that all rooms must be rectangles. There are very good reasons why rooms are almost always rectangles. Ideally one would be able to specify the specific sizes and shapes of the various rooms that one needed—at that point we might be onto something actually useful. But, rectangles. Nobody makes furniture for septagonal rooms.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:03 PM on July 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


At least 90% of the rooms as rectangles, with no greater than a 4:1 ratio of sides to prevent it from evolving designs with a 100 sq ft room as 1'x100'.
posted by fings at 9:37 PM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Interesting experiment. I was reminded of this plan (The Geschwister-Scholl-Schule in Lünen from 1958). When I was very young, I was taught to do this type of planning on paper, I don't know if anyone teaches that anymore, but it's probably still used for planning large structures like airports and hospitals.
You would write out the parameters and then draw tons of sort-of-to-scale configurations based on them, sometimes using paper cut-outs for consistency. Then you'd adapt the best one to modular structures. Architects with a strong understanding of structure could make it work in a manner that seemed organic. I like it, but it is also a style of architecture that is hard to adapt to changing needs, because the organic forms are derived from an extreme specificity of purpose.
posted by mumimor at 12:46 AM on August 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


I wish the user had done a bit more prior art research as this is a very interesting topic in the history of computational design. Optimizing walk distance was literally one of the first problems architects tried to solve when they had access to computers. It’d be interesting to compare that graph-based approach with this one which is uses the computational architect “go-to” of Voronoi patterns
posted by q*ben at 6:28 AM on August 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


As architecture they may be more costly to build but the outcomes are more circular and so they may be less costly to heat. As Simon says these shapes are simpler now with prefabrication, CNC and so on. I find the real barrier to non-rectilinear design to be locked thinking rather than money.

Thanks for that link mumimor. Looks like it is still informing school design in Europe.

In my experience people respond better to voronoi-type spaces, and compared with other irregular tilings tight-corners are also avoided. I find surveyed spaces often result in very tight corners which are very costly as space is wasted.
posted by unearthed at 1:36 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Looking forward to chowing down on some LASAG at the CAFET.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:03 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Ah, well then you make all the rooms modular, so they can be shifted around as needed!
Key phrase: "But sir, there's a lake there!"
posted by hat_eater at 4:56 AM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


There’s an untapped market for modular lakes, I’m certain of it.
posted by darkstar at 5:13 AM on August 2, 2018


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