Topological Queries and Analysis of School Buildings Based on Building Information Modeling (BIM) Using Parametric Design Tools and Visual Programming to Develop New Building Typologies

Abstract

School buildings are currently one of the largest portions of planning and building projects in Germany. In order to reflect the continuous developments in school building construction with constantly changing spatial requirements, an approach to analyse, derive and combine patterns of schools is proposed to adapt school typologies accordingly. Therefore, the topology is analysed, concerning interconnection methods, such as adjacency, accessibility, depth, and flow. The geometric analysis of e.g. room sizes or spatial proportions is enhanced by including grouping of rooms, estimated room clusters, or room shapes. Furthermore, text-matching is used to determine e.g. room program fulfilment, or assigning functional room descriptions to predefined room types, revealing huge differences of terms throughout time and architects. First results of the analyses show a relevant correlation between spatial proportion and room types.