Parametric Generator for Architectural and Urban 3D Objects

The main goal of this chapter is to present a research project, developed by Map-Aria research team, which consists in applying automatic generative methods in design processes. The Map-Aria research team of the School of Architecture of Lyon develops modeling assistants within the process of architectural conception. They run specific heuristics dramatically reducing time-consuming tasks of wide scale architectural and urban modeling by the implementation of bio-mimetic and/ or parametric generative processes. Prior experiments implemented rule-based generative grammars with interesting results. The authors developed and finalized a specific tool able to model the global structure of architectural objects through a morphological and semantic description of its finite elements. This discrete conceptual model still in study was refined during the geometric modeling of the “Vieux Lyon” district, containing a high level of morpho-stylistic disparity. Future developments should allow increasing the genericity of its descriptive efficiency, permitting even more sparse morphological and\or stylistic varieties. Its general purpose doesn’t consist in creating a “universal modeler,” but to offer a simple tool able to quickly describe a majority of standard architectural objects compliant with some standard parametric definition rules. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2077-3.ch013