Climatic Formations: Evolutionary Dynamics of Urban Morphologies

Abstract

In recent years, sustainable design methods have become a major concern within the building industry. There is also a growing awareness of the impact urban morphologies have on the overall energy and fuel consumption of a city. This paper investigates digital form-finding methods for generating an urban tissue to suit climatic conditions. In this research, a cascading series of genetic algorithms at multiple scales is coupled with environmental evaluation methods as fitness criteria. The methods devised in this paper integrate evaluation tools written with an object-oriented scripting language together with the Galapagos genetic solver in the Rhino/Grasshopper/Python platform. It is shown that the developed methods can be used to create large-scale urban layouts with improved street-level climate conditions as well as aggregations of buildings that function together to improve environmental and architectural parameters. The methodology developed in this paper is tested on a site with an area of approximately 1 km 2 in Brooklyn, New York, chosen because its climate features a large yearly variation in temperature and wind regime. The existing surrounding urban fabric, along with the local climatic conditions, is taken as the initial input in order to develop algorithmic processes with sensitivity to the site context.

Cool City Design: Integrating Real-Time Urban Canyon Assessment into the Design Process for Chinese and Australian Cities

“…As this method remains within the design modelling and visualisation environment, it lends itself to mixing intuitive compositional design gestures, cultural understandings and conceptual design ideas with meaningful environmental impact feedback. This differs from other algorithmic optimisation modelling approaches (Panão, Gonçalves, & Ferrão, 2008;Yu, Austern, Jirathiyut, & Moral, 2014) in that it does not attempt to remove the human element of design. There is however potential for further investigation of using either CPU or GPU based SVF analysis methods in the exploration of optimisation algorithms using MaxScript or Max Creation Graph, or by porting the approach to Rhino 3D with Grasshopper.…”

Optimization test of a rule-based swarm intelligence simulation for the conceptual design process

“…Using the principles of evolutionary biology, inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover, GAs offer solutions to various design problems in a short time (Renner and Ekárt, 2003; Kim, 2013; Yu et al ., 2014). These algorithms, which have very complicated programming structures, can easily be used through the Galapagos program developed by David Rutten (Rutten, 2013; González and Fiorito, 2015).…”

Application of Urban Scale Energy Modelling and Multi-Objective Optimization Techniques for Building Energy Renovation at District Scale

“…Although the use of multi-objective optimization in the domain of energy retrofitting for individual or small groups of buildings has been widely discussed in the literature, the application of district scale retrofitting, encompassing not only energy and economic goals but also environmental sustainability aspects, are less frequent. Indeed, UBEM and USEM coupled with multi-objective optimization have been addressed mainly towards the optimal design and operation of distributed urban energy systems [60][61][62] and new zero energy districts [63,64], considering, for instance, optimized building shape [65], building geometry and size of energy systems [66], and urban layout [67,68].…”