Evolving Floorplans

These kinds of tools are mostly about the input constraints, heuristics, and weights. I'd love to see more about this with more practical constraints (rectilinear rooms and hallways, minimum area for cafetaria/gym, etc) and additional heuristics, such as window area in classrooms, number of hallways/intersections for ease-of-navigation, and building costs beyond just material use.

These types of exercises are useful not to find their solutions, but to reveal the shortcomings of the model used to create them - and our thus our own mental models!<p>Building design is older than humankind, and there&#x27;s tens of millenia worth of reasons why they are the way they are. But those reasons aren&#x27;t always clear. Essentially modern floor plan design is the output of a black-box machine (human) learning algorithm.<p>The flawed output here, and the comments, help us point out what some of the missing variables are: egress, airflow, construction cost, etc. Do enough of this and you can get a vastly improved model.

Sure, it looks cool. But there are so many other properties of a home that aren&#x27;t accounted for in this model (mostly aesthetic ones, like cozyness, feelings of safety&#x2F;comfort, how the plan interacts with light, etc). One day we&#x27;ll live in homes with automated floorplans, I&#x27;m sure of it. But it won&#x27;t happen (or at least, we won&#x27;t be happy about living in such things) until the day we figure out ways to deal with more dimensions than efficiency (who knows, maybe crowdsourcing ratings of CGI rendered apartments will be the answer, somehow it&#x27;ll be solved).

The author describes the results as &#x27;irrational,&#x27; but I&#x27;d hardly agree with the negative connotation of that word: I think that the generated floorplans look <i>lovely</i>, and I wish that I&#x27;d gone to school somewhere like that. Far from irrational, I think it&#x27;s quite rational to try to design buildings to be pleasant to live in, not just easy to draw with a straightedge.<p>Also, the generated rooms look much like the sort of rooms one would build with cob. A cob schoolhouse could be awesome.

I thought classrooms required an emergency exit. The original layout is probably specifically designed to give every room an exterior wall. Still, very interesting project.

I love this. It makes me believe that our sci-fi future might be more in line with the Timeless Way of Building than with cinderblock utilitarianism.<p>I too would love to see a 3D environment built from these, so we could get a feel for them.

I&#x27;ve been in a few apartments that had novelty floor plans without right angles. All of them were terrible. Granted I have not been in one owned by somebody rich or skilled enough to only have custom made furniture.

The Hogwarts floorplan improves on this, reorganizing in real time to the needs of individual students and faculty. Any sufficiently advanced set of genetic algorithms, sensors and moving partitions is indistinguishable from magic.

i am a product of american public school. in every school all the classrooms (except portables) had a wall that was mostly windows. you can see thats also true in the original school design. i’d rather have a ton of windows than shorter distance to walk. you could feel the enclosed difference in portable rooms

His genetic examples look like European cities compared to the actual floor layouts, which are more like New World ones designed on a grid layout by central planners.<p>Perhaps there&#x27;s wisdom in allowing cities to grow organically&#x2F;chaotically after all.

On a related note I’d love a way to optimize kitchen layout. What items to store in cabinets and drawers to minimize dishwasher unloading time, optimize cooking.

I can see this kind of architecture being the next fad in architecture as a kind of next step from the Gehry-style architecture. I can totally see someone pr firm or tour guide bragging &quot;our building was designed by a computer algorithm to be optimized for our needs...&quot;

Those floor plans creep me out and i don&#x27;t know why.

This is great. I did a major project in eighth grade about designing a school to make traffic flow more logical and the strict times they specified for student travel achievable. We were expected to leave a class, travel to our lockers, accomplish any necessary bathroom tasks and to travel to the next class in four minutes and 20 seconds. Failing to do so was a disciplinary matter, but it did not appear that the school or our schedules were designed with this sort of urgency in mind.<p>The main focus of my solution was to make the school a torus. Like many of my youth projects (writing a text adventure game...), I did not have the knowledge to solve the problems scientifically.

I&#x27;m an architect in germany, working as project-lead for the initial stages of medium sized buildings till building permit and therefore responsible for the conception and its validation in all terms of structure, fire-protection, installations, etc.<p>I&#x27;d like to make my point that any kind of over-optimization of one or more aspects will put one of the biggest virtues of truly good and functional architecture at risk: being adaptive for a wide variety of future changes (use, program, technology, climate, energy resources, partitioning, shrinking, expanding, etc.).<p>The actual task of designing a building is to find the right balance in a myriad of parameters, which sometimes create synergies (think sunlight and heating), but often are just one step away from undesirable impacts (think sunlight and overheating). Flexibility in architecture always results out of generous tolerances and robustness - which is always in danger to be eliminated by optimization for limited scenarios.<p>Also many aspects of the design logically derive from each other: if I plan a school with natural ventilation, it&#x27;d be probably a good idea to have windows in two sides of the room, that can exchange the whole air of the room in a 5min break. If I opt for a mechanical ventilation this advantage would be gone and the disadvantages of not having a more compact cubature would override and result in a completely different layout.<p>While I appreciate all kind of tools that give me an insight into complex interdependencies (how do floorplans with optimized A,B,C look like?) i think that good architectural solutions need humans to make a tailor-made decision based on a bigger picture of our society that has the chance to be valid for some decades(centuries?). Good architects choose to rely on typologies that evolved from history for this difficult task and transform them when needed.<p>I&#x27;d be curious if the approach of OP could be used backwards as a software based analysis what details make successful typologies actually successful.<p>On a side note: It&#x27;s pretty interesting that the resulting floorplans of OP are somewhat similar to the traditional arabic city structure (google traditional damascus city center and zoom into the still intact quartiers).

I work in 3D drafting &amp; design, and CNC programming. In my life I&#x27;ve seen woodwork go from almost always boxes, to heavily jellybean, organic shapes. Because we have the tools to do it, people want it. Any less looks dated.<p>Houses will go the same way as the tools become available. In the yacht business a new design took a room full of men a couple years to design and draw, so they were slow, serious business. Now it takes three guys at computers six months. So people expect it: a new design every year at the boat show. Go two years without and bad rumors circulate.

Almost 2 decades ago I wrote a perl script to automatically optimize open space floor plan using genetic algorithm.<p>The idea was to have a function, for each office worker in the office that would grade the place they are sitting in (distance to toilet, printer, lighting, space around desk, etc.) and have algorithm evolve open space plans to have best overall satisfaction and also make sure that there are no places that have very low score.<p>Now, this algorithm could only take existing floor plan, it could only place furniture on existing floor with existing walls but it was still nice excercise.

There&#x27;s a whole academic sub-discipline in Mechanical Engineering devoted to optimizing geometries like this. Shape Optimization tries to find shapes with particular properties, e.g. minimizing material use while maximizing shear strength. You&#x27;ll find hundreds of papers going back decades if you want to dig into it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C39&amp;q=shape+optimization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C39&amp;q=sha...</a>

You’d need to carefully study the safety implications. People already get disoriented in fires when they have to move in a straight line. Add winding and branches and it could cause some issues.

All non square rooms I experienced where terrible to place furniture.

I like it, despite the infeasibility. Here are a few more things missing from the plan: 1) The main door should be by the admin offices, for security reasons. 2) The gym has to be rectangular for the basketball court, or large enough that it can contain it. 3) One of the gym&#x27;s looks slightly non-convex, which is pointless. (Although that might be an artifact of rendering the door.)

It just makes me think of Harry Potter ladder, in reality, there must be considered lots of real-time calculations.

Why is it considered good to minimize walking time and hallway time in schools?

Interesting that the optimized floorplans look so much like brains!

Right optimized one looks best, because it&#x27;s the only one that doesn&#x27;t squirrel any of the big rooms (library, gym, cafeteria) away at the ends of corridors.