Generative design approaches to daylight in MURBs

Abstract

Access to acceptable levels of daylight are important for people's quality of life. Multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) are known to perform poorly in terms of daylight compared to other residential building types. There are neither appropriate agreed upon metrics, nor effective methods for designing for daylight in MURBs. This paper presents results of a speculative design study that utilizes generative design to explore alternative geometries for the MURB tower typology. The experiment combines a genetic algorithm for spatial variation with climate-based daylight modeling (CBDM) to test the new forms against variations of the point tower MURB floorplan are commonly used. This paper identifies the poor performance of typical MURBs for daylight, and proposed new techniques for form generation. A new workflow has been developed and tested and a number of challenging issues have been identified.