A Thousand Floor Plans

One of the most basic tasks for an architect is floor plan design. Imagine you have thousands of design options for the same house represented as floor plans. Which criteria can you use to sort them? Is there a “best” one? How can we empower an architect to choose one of thousand options for their clients? And most importantly, how could we empower the home owner to choose one design for their house?

The course “A Thousand Floor Plans” looked at techniques to compare and sort thousands of variations of residential floor plans for the same design brief. The course explores apps and app making as a potential new task for the architect searching how to stay relevant in a society with an information overload.

Each team of students was asked to sort a large set of floor plans based on one of the following features: views, energy, daylight, orientation, water, costs and time, spatial organisation, etc. They developed a Grasshopper tool for architects to navigate the set of designs.

Students also created a graphical concept for a mobile app targeted at homeowners wanting to browse through thousands of floor plans. The main challenge was to consider strategies for translating the numerical results of an analysis routine into experiences from daily life which the home owners can relate to. For example:“having a sun spot on the breakfast table with my morning coffee in the kitchen.”

Each team conducted a survey with homeowners to narrow down the focus on the most important aspects to analyse. Download the survey in English or in German.

Students learned basic concepts of computational analysis and how to implement them in Grasshopper. At the end of the semester, students delivered:

• a digital analysis routine implemented in Grasshopper
• a 2 minute video explaining how to use the Grasshopper definition
• and a booklet documenting the analysis and the mobile app concept

Course dates: Winter Semester 2016/2017

See the projects results from the course:

Don’t you want to live in a house with the best daylight? A daylight that matches your way of living and habits? If yes, Chaselight is for you! The aim of the app is to empower homeowners to find the best floor plan where they can enjoy their daily activities, such as drinking coffee, with the suitable levels of daylight. Daylight is measured in intensities (luxes) but how can you explain it to a non-expert? We thought about referring to activities — different actions need different light ambiances and therefore intensities. Users select the activity and the app links this activity to a range of intensities in which should be suitable to do this activity. How do we translate these results to a floor plan? Users see a floor plan with every room painted in a different color. The darker ones are the rooms where it is less suitable to do the action and vice versa for the lighter ones. In case they want to know more about a floor plan, they can click on one room and see exactly where they can carry out these activities and when. It’s then in the user’s hands to say if the floor plan suits them or not.

Booklet: https://issuu.com/ddu-research/docs/1000_floorplans_booklet_hamel-hamot

Students:

Mariona Carrion

Morgane Hamel

Louise Hamot

Das Video zeigt das Ergebnis des Seminars „Tausend Grundrisse“ am Fachgebiet DDU – Digital Design Unit der TU Darmstadt. Die Aufgabe bestand darin eine App zu konzipieren mit der man den für sich idealen Grundriss erhält. Wir haben die Aufgabe soweit auslegt, dass wir anhand des Wandaufbaus, die vorgegebenen Grundrisse dahingehend mit Honeybee überprüfen können, welcher zonierte Raum die höchste Dichte an Behaglichkeit aufweist. Das App-Konzept nutzt Rhino und Grasshopper, sowie die Plugins Ladybug und Honeybee mit deren Hilfe ein Algorithmus erstellt wird, der uns als Ergebnis die drei passendsten Grundrisse für den User ermittelt. Die Grundrisse zeigen uns das Haus mit seiner Kubatur und dessen Energieverbrauch, anhand des Wandaufbaus. Davon leiten wir dann den Raum mit der höchsten, in diesem Falle thermischen Behaglichkeit ab. Die Parameter für Grasshopper beziehen sich auf den Standort, den Energieverbrauch anhand des Fassadenaufbaus und die Fassadenöffnung um die Behaglichkeit zu ermitteln. Die Analyse läuft über Honeybee, das z.B. Klimadaten für den ausgewählten Standort auswertet. Die Ergebnisse werden farbig visualisiert ausgegeben um den Vergleich darstellen zu können.

BOOKLET: https://issuu.com/joehartmann/docs/1000_floorplans_joachin_sand_hartma

Students:

Jörg Hartmann

Stefanie Joachim

Max Sand

The consideration of renewable energetic gain of a building becomes a main focus of contemporary sustainable assessments. As a first approach the following survey, covering many aspects why people choose floor plans, shows different aspects but renewable energetic gain is one of the most important. With this app people can analyze various floor plans, on how much energy they could provide through solar systems in a whole year. With several floor plans they can calculate the kWh production per m2 which are connected to the roof surface. The kWh result of a floor plan allows us to calculate the heat and the electric gain through a solar system. These calculations and their technical aspects we tackled with a combination of several floor plans, we drew in Rhino and connected them afterwards with Grasshopper, respectively Ladybug. Through these programs we calculate the energetic outcome per year, produced by any given square meter floor plan based on a specific location. To mask those rather complicated, technical aspects, we developed several app mock ups to display one of many possibilities for a user-friendly usage.

BOOKLET: https://issuu.com/marcritz/docs/booklet_ritzruffertshoferwalser_e73b3aa31cb8e4

Students:

Luisa Ruffertshöfer

Marc Ritz

Gerrit Walser

There is a lot of factors that affect people when looking for a new home. Layout, orientation, and personal preferences are some of the most important ones. But what about money? Most people have to work with a limited budget when buying a new house, and the electricity, water and heat bills will be a fundamental part in the expenses of the family from the moment they start living in the house. That is the reason why we focused our effort in making a tool that allows users to calculate how large some of the bills will be while living in a chosen house, particularly the electricity ones, based in the living style of the homeowners. Our app also shows the users how the selected house can help them reduce these costs using solar panels to provide their own solar energy and thus saving money. Each house has its own „saving“ rate, and the app sorts them to make easier for the future homeowners to choose their dream house.

Booklet: http://issuu.com/kivivi/docs/booklet-pliego?e=12585695/45165381

Students:

Ana Sophie Sánchez Wurm

Ana Baraibar Jiménez

“How could homeowners choose a floor plan between thousands? And how could this floor plan fit their needs?” This question was the topic of the seminar “1000 floor plans” lead by Anton Savov. Through conducting a survey we found out that the building costs for a house are very important for the homeowners. And that is how our idea was born. We decided to create an app that calculates the costs of construction out of a floor plan. To keep the app as user-friendly as possible, it only calculates the construction costs for the shell. That makes it easier for the user to understand and to get a feeling for the floor plan. Checkout our booklet and the video to get further information of how our app works.

BOOKLET: http://issuu.com/maximilianpfaff/docs/costinator?e=26868194/45128479

Students:

Nicole Klumb

Macimilian Pfaff

ViewSPOTS is an app that helps people find the perfect floor plan based on their own visual preferences. It analyzes the view connections to the outside and the visual connections between the different rooms in the inside of the house. ViewSPOTS uses Grasshopper to analyze the views of a floor plan. From any given point the direct and indirect internal and external views are calculated. A grid of many points analyzes the entire floor plan and creates a view connection diagram. The diagram displays the amount of internal views among the rooms and the external views of each room separately. A heat map is generated from the external views which gives an overall impression of the amount of building envelope openings. Each person has different needs and requirements when it comes to their own living spaces – our app recognizes this and allows the user to find a floor plan that best suits their needs based on their own view connection diagram. Their diagram is matched with a floor plan from a databank of thousands of already analyzed floor plans and thus, the users finds their own perfect floor plan.

ViewSPOTS Booklet: https://issuu.com/akhelbig/docs/thousand_floor_plans_booklet_helbig

Students:

Anjuscha Helbig

Philipp Vehrenberg

Imagine you buy a beautiful property at the seaside and want to build your dream house here… There are millions of ways to lay out the floor plan of your house and the app YOUR PERSONAL VIEW helps you find the best one, depending on what you want to see from which room! One of the most important aspects of a wonderful house is the view you have from inside. Of course you want to see as much as possible of the sea. Also seeing trees and greenery is very important. What’s not important at all is the noisy, not so beautiful street or the neighbour’s house. YOUR PERSONAL VIEW uses Grasshopper to analyse on the one hand the location of your house and on the other hand a thousand floor plans. In the first step you get a ground floor plan with your preferred views. First you select different parameters and adjust the importance of the view of this parameter according to your interests. With the ground floor plan as an outcome you also receive the percentage of the amount of the view of each parameter. In the second step you can choose a viewpoint in a room of the ground floor plan you obtained in the first step. The viewpoint can be placed according to the furniture in a specific room. The app will calculate the percentage of all four parameters which already occurred in step one.

Booklet https://issuu.com/damaske_elgindi/docs/your_personal_view_damaske_el_gindi

Students:

Natascha Damaske

Dina El Gindi

Nowadays in China there are so many residencial areas. Different flats, floor plans and arrangments make people very confused when they want to choose a proper flat and spend probably the largest amount of their savings to buy a flat. Usually, at the opening of the sales for a new residencial area, local people go hurriedlly and stay in queue, having to decide in a very short time which flat they want to buy while listening to what the salesman says and feelling the nervous atmosphere among the other buyers. We think this way to make a decision to buy he home for one's whole life is very unreasonalble. So we decide to make an app, called CUSTOM FLAT, to help both the real estate agent and the buyers to make the purchase of a flat more satisfactory. Before the residential area opens for sale, the real estate agent can use this app to input data that lets users know this area, instead of printing many leaflets and wasting time to explain over and over again. The buyers can use this app and filter based on DAYLIGHT performance to compare and choose their dream home. We used the Rhino and Grasshopper to trace the sunlight trace and calculate the amount, which lets users choose, which appartment is fits them better according to their own preferences for sunlight.

Booklet in ISSUU: https://issuu.com/zy.lu-mx.wang/docs/final

Students:

Zhiyin Lu

Mengxue Wang