Student: Oliver Tessin

The computer can calculate more factors in less time than the most experienced architect. This potential could be employed to create for a design tool that can calculate complex characteristics of buildings, providing multiple possible solutions for the organization of rooms. Such a work-flow-concept would consist of a series of tools and must be flexible for subjective design issues. The goal is to generate geometric floor plans that are not the result of structural conventions or subjective influences but a conclusion based on the functional connection of a cluster of rooms These geometries should follow the mechanisms of natural growth e.g. structures of bones. To do so, floor plan data will be recorded by the architectural plugin Gephi. After it is then imported in Grasshopper, the resulting graph can be translated with a Kangaroo-Plugin into forces and nodes. The parameters can influence or even cancel out each other. As a result the privacy level of a room, for example, could be significantly influenced by the size and position of the room in the overall floor plan, the amount and kind of connections with other rooms, or the size and position of its windows. The automatically arranged graph can be used for a variety of purposes, but this project focuses on four different tools. The ‘graph-modeler’ marks two visualization types. The first visualization is based on the arrangement in the floor plan, the second version frees itself from the floor plan and arranges itself automatically due to its internal connection parameters. In the second tool, the ‘room diagram’ is used as a graphical device for an abstract visualization of a rooms program. The room knots are arrange by size as a segments of a circle. Furthermore the brightness will be visualized. The third tool, the ‘space syntax’ transfers the analytic database on the organization of a new floor plan and transmits graphic and numerical feedback, in particular regarding the topic of privacy. The last tool, the ‘space modeler’ enables the processing of geometries in Rhino and displays three-dimensional cubic measurements. This can be useful  to avoid improperly proportioning of the floor plan area. It is an ideal tool for volume studies.