Building Massing Optimisation in Early Design Stage

This paper proposes a performance-driven design workflow based on Total Sunlight Hours evaluation. The objective is to investigate an optimal solution of a building massing design meeting solar radiation criteria as early as in the conceptual design stage. In our paper, such a process is demonstrated through a case study on an Experimental Social Housing project. We illustrate how design constraints are encoded with the evaluation criterion, Total Sunlight Hours (TSH), through an integrated computational workflow. Alongside with such a computation-intensive process, we also experimented with the same design project using a conventional design approach. The advantages and disadvantages of using a performance-driven computational workflow over a conventional design process are discussed and presented. In particular, we examine how a performance-driven design workflow can be integrated within the iterative design process and how human designers interact with computation to investigate optimal design solutions.