Suggestive Site Planning with Conditional GAN and Urban GIS Data

In architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, site planning refers to the organizational process of site layout. A fundamental step for site planning is the design of building layout across the site. This process is hard to automate due to its multi-modal nature: it takes multiple constraints such as street block shape, orientation, program, density, and plantation. The paper proposes a prototypical and extensive framework to generate building footprints as masterplan references for architects, landscape architects, and urban designers by learning from the existing built environment with Artificial Neural Networks. Pix2PixHD Conditional Generative Adversarial Neural Network is used to learn the mapping from a site boundary geometry represented with a pixelized image to that of an image containing building footprint color-coded to various programs. A dataset containing necessary information is collected from open source GIS (Geographic Information System) portals from the city of Boston, wrangled with geospatial analysis libraries in python, trained with the TensorFlow framework. The result is visualized in Rhinoceros and Grasshopper, for generating site plans interactively.