A Procedure for Generating Floor Plans
- Computer Aided Design
DISTANCE AS DESIGN CRITERIA
Buildings should be designed for people with emphasis being placed on the anthropological, social, and psychological implications that can be expressed in physical form.
The criteria used in a house design,
for example, can be grouped into three main categories. 1) Flow or movement. 2) Sight or supervision. 3) Sound. All of which can be considered as related to distance. The wish to minimize movement within a structure is usually implemented by placing highly frequented units closer. Supervision, too, becomes easier if the - activity in need of surveillance is not located far off. When activity in a certain unit involves noise it will be placed a long distance away from units in which noise is distracting. In this study distance will be regarded, therefore as the sole restrictive factor in the procedure of constructing a pattern.
When a designer tries to solve a problem using intuitive design process, he can never be fully aware of the structure of his problem. His immediate memory capacity is limited. Therefore, when an attempt is made to manipulate vast amounts of information it is forced into approximations whereas either deliberately or by mistake incorrect decisions are made.
It seems obvious that a great need exists for an operational procedure that will give the architect greater ability to diagnose the behavioral conditions that exist in a family, hospital, office, etc. Also, for the client to have a consistent and uninterrupted evaluation of the problem a wide variety of solutions must be generated in a short time span which will result in a better mutual understanding of architect and client. A client may not always understand the implementation of his preferences, only upon seeing a layout design reflecting his ideas he might realize their actual outcome. He can therefore, modify his preferences, use the same procedure to reallocate the elements accordingly and finally after several iterations obtain a successful and satisfactory layout.
The problem, then, is to create an allocation of elements on a two dimensional topological space arranged to satisfy a predetermined criterion function. This is not always possible in conventional design methods, for the reason already stated above, lack of ability to manipulate vast amounts of information without an approximation, and the inability to produce many
alternatives in a short time.
A methodical procedure with algorithm translating these predetermined criterion function could handle this problem. The present study proposes such a procedure.
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