Mathematically Developing Building Facades: An Algorithmic Framework

The importance of Algorithmic Design (AD) is growing due to its advantages for the design practice: It empowers the creative process, facilitating design changes and the exploration of larger design spaces in viable time, and supports the search for better-performing solutions that satisfy environmental demands. Still, AD is a complex approach and requires specialized knowledge. To promote its use in architecture, we present a mathematics-based framework to support architects with the algorithmic development of designs by following a continuous workflow embracing the three main design stages: exploration, evaluation, and manufacturing. The proposed framework targets the design of buildings’ facades due to their aesthetical and environmental relevance. In this paper, we explain the framework’s structure and its mathematical implementation, and we describe the predefined algorithms, as well as their combination strategies. We focus on the framework’s algorithms that generate different geometric patterns, exploring their potentialities to create and modify different facade designs. In the end, we evaluate the flexibility of the framework for generating, modifying, and optimizing different geometrical patterns in an architectural design context.