The further explained grasshopper scripts on the building volumes generation are the output of the DigiWo reserach cooperation between the Bauhaus University Weimar, Decoding Spaces GbR and DIPLAN (today: REHUB digitale Planer). This research was supported by the ZukunftBau Program by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building, and Community.

In the following tutorial, you will get introduced to a set of User Objects & Components for the semi-automatic generation of residential multi-family buildings, enabling a user to generate either an urban block or a slab typology, as well as provide the scripts with a predefined sequence, that can generate variations with minimal guidance. The video below presents the concept of how the generation process is organized.

Project Team:
Iuliia Osintseva (Author), Reinhard König (Supervisor), Sven Schneider (Supervisor), Martin Bielik (Supervisor), Andreas Berst (Contributor), Egor Gavrilov (Student Assistant), Martin Oravec (Student Assistant)

If you prefer reading over watching – here is the paper on the block generation.

1a. Basic setup.

In order to start the generation, the minimal requirement is a closed planar polyline in Rhino, representing the construction site. Additionally, you can add a layer with lines, representing the street axis, as well as the neighbor buildings context on a separate layer. Both those layers will then be considered during the generation.

It is as well required to select the location of the building area in order to derive the correct spacing (see the video above to learn about the spacing concept). Further, you can select multiple values for the building depth to try out, as well as set up a range of the floors count for the basic block. The output of this step is a closed block (or a range of those) around the construction plot perimeter, considering the required spacing based on the block height.

It is possible though, that the spacing should be neglected, in case that your construction plot is placed within existing blocks and thus you should continue the street profile, placing the buildings right along the plot edge. In this case, you can just draw the lines in Rhino to indicate where the spacing should not appear, and insert them into „Baulinie“ input.

The resulting generations are gathered at the „House Instance“ data type, which is a combination of six different parameters: plot after spacing; surfaces; outlines (façade lines towards the street); inlines (façade lines towards towards the inner yard); depth of a building (as a number), floor count (as a number). Using Surface and Floor Count you can display the geometry preview as well as calculate the basic performance indicators, such as FAR, Site Occupancy, or Total Built Area.

1b. Actions over the Block.

1c. Examplatory Generation Sequence

In the following video you‘ll find an examplatory combination of actions for generating a bunch of various building volumes for one construction site, including the parameters setting for each of the actions. Keep in mind that the suggested sequence is not the only possible one, and you can try to arrange actions in another way, and thus receive different results.

*please remember to unblock the .gha components before inserting them into your Libraries folder

2a. Single Plot Generation.

Here, the generation logic is slightly different than it was the case for the block typology. Whereas block was about offsetting and further modifying the site outline, slabs is about the pattern of the placement of several simple forms on the given site. Therefore, it is possible to order several slabs at one site. First, the site edges are translated into 4 characteristic edges based on the angles between them.

Further, slabs can appear along each of the edges – as long as the space is sufficient.

Depending on the selected order of the edges, the pattern of the slabs allocation can differ greatly.

Accordingly, each further parameter to influence the slabs pattern is repeated four times in order to allow different variations along each of the edges. In all further parameters, the order of the values will be applied accordingly to your selected order of the site edges. You can re-adjust the edges order at any later moment of the generation. Below, you can find a short video with the overview of the parameters that you can influence for the slabs typology.

2b. Subdivision of Complex Concave Sites and Multiple Plots Generation

In case of large area plots, such generation might cause monotonous strict patterns, non usable for modern urban plannings. In order to escape this, we developed a method on the subdivision of the big concave plots into smaller and simpler sub-fragments. Those sub-plots can then be filled with slabs in a single direction.

In the previous part, there were nine parameters for each slab raw at a single edge. In the case of generating slabs for multiple plots at the same time, the number of parameters gets multiplied accordingly. As follows, taking control over generation becomes exhausting. That is why for the multiple plots generation it was decided to leave only single-direction slabs. However, the user can decide between different orientation patterns as well as subdivision patterns himself, thus still exploring the design space to a several extent. In the following video you can see the brief overview of parameters to guide the generation for the slabs typology at multiple sites.