A PARAMETRIC DESIGN FRAMEWORK FOR A SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF OPEN SPACE DESIGN IN EARLY DESIGN STAGES

Abstract

The notion of a parametric urban design has become a phenomenon recently. Researchers have been searching for various parameters related to urban morphology. Tremendous efforts have also been put into investigating how parametric modelling could be adapted for designs in both large and small scale urban plans. In parallel, there has been an increased concern on the issue of urban sustainability. Specifically, numerous studies attempted to deal with human comfort in urban spaces, which can be categorized as social sustainability. As performance evaluation should be an essential part of parametric modelling, it will be natural to ask how environmental performances that affect human comfort directly can be incorporated into a parametric urban design process. However, previous studies concerning parametric urban design and environmental performances in terms of human comfort have been mainly focused on searching for optimized designs. Even worse, most of these studies have been primarily about the environmental performances of the final design solutions. Since human comfort should not be the only criterion in urban design, it is of importance to generate design options that can yield similar comfort levels for further design explorations. This is especially important at an early sketch design stage since a lot of decisions in this stage will restrict the environmental performances of the final design solutions. However, designers usually do not consider this issue at the beginning of the design process as there is no proper tool to incorporate human comfort in early design stages. As a result, the primary objective of this study is to layout a parametric urban design framework which can generate design options according to the desired comfort levels at a sketch design stage. Green open spaces that are considered to be basic elements of urban fabric, and thermal comfort constituted by trees in these spaces will be adapted to demonstrate how the design framework can guide the development of a parametric model for generating design options.