Aedas R&D

Interactive solar envelope
The first application allowed pre-design evaluation of the site through calculating the building envelope that would cause the least overshadowing of selected adjacent buildings. A site model of all the adjacent buildings was constructed together with specifications of window areas to calculate percentage of overshadowing throughout the year and the corresponding development envelopes. The application allowed the design team to interactively set maximum overshadowing percentages and visualise in real time how that would affect the buildable volume.

For Dudley House this generated envelope created the proposed build-up taken forward into the tower design on the north edge of the site and lower build-up on the south end.

Residential unit arrangements
In order to get an overview of how apartment units could arrange themselves within a floor-plate we wrote an application that generated arrangement options per floor. As input a number of simplified apartment layouts of different sizes were abstracted onto a grid with certain constraints specified with regards to daylight, balconies and entrance. Similarly the floor that the units would populate had to be specified in terms of the boundary of the floor plate, location of stair wells and service cores, and the program that floor had to house in terms of number of units of each size.

The application is using an evolutionary search process in order to arrange the units within the footprint boundary with a given number of different apartment types while still guaranteeing the constraints mentioned above such as access from apartments to stair well and lift shafts, daylight access to window areas, and balcony areas situated at the boundary of the building.