Advanced design of complex façades

ABSTRACT The Digital Transformation offers completely new possibilities for architects and façade designers. Through the application of Artificial Intelligence many design decisions can be made automatically. Since most design tasks are ultimately unique and therefore not operational, fully automatic façade design will not always lead to a satisfactory result. For these reasons, the authors propose a targeted combination of rational (rule-based) and intuitive (poetic) design strategies. The design task is divided into operational subtasks that are processed automatically on the computer and non-operational subtasks that are solved by computers and humans together. A creative and agile design team evaluates different variants proposed by the computer. Promising developments will be pursued and further developed. Then the generative mechanism is adapted and the design is optimized. The concept is refined until a sustainable, user-oriented design is available. However, for the foreseeable future, the solution of non-operational problems will only be possible through human intelligence. The fear that good architecture can be generated at the push of a button and that computers will replace architects and engineers is therefore unfounded.