Passing this type of Turing test feels like a new step forward for computational design. Looking at one of their schemes, you can’t see the algorithm that is, you can’t tell that every angle, measurement, and configuration was tested thousands of times until everything was just so. Historically, computational designers have flaunted their digital underpinnings with superfluous curves and other flourishes, but the schemes produced by The Living’s algorithms are largely indistinguishable from that of a human designer. Still, the uncertainty about the origin of the designs is telling. After some investigation, it turns out that while the Van Wijnen Groep has been applying The Living’s methods to other projects that would eventually be built, another developer had won the rights to build on the Alkmaar site.
When shown the plans, Benjamin and Villaggi weren’t able to immediately confirm whether the residential units were a product of their algorithms. As Benjamin tells me, “Some people seem to have this assumption that sustainability costs more, but in this case we can do both.”Ī few months ago, a real estate agency began selling speculative houses on the Alkmaar site.
BUILDING GENERATOR ALGORITHM SOFTWARE
In comparing the results, The Living’s project lead Lorenzo Villaggi says, the manually created designs “took an approach that was known to work based on past experience, but the algorithmic solutions moved beyond what you would typically think of.”īecause the software could rapidly churn through essentially countless variations, it allowed the designers to explore the less obvious solutions that better balanced the developer’s need for profit against the community’s need for light, thermal comfort, energy conservation, and amenities. Meanwhile, the Van Wijnen Groep’s own designers created competing plans using their conventional processes and rules of thumb. Working with the parameters of the Alkmaar site, The Living developed an algorithm that could-with the supervision and guidance of a designer-lay out, evaluate, and refine buildings. The prospective project developer, the Van Wijnen Groep, had seen how The Living employed generative algorithms to create Autodesk’s MaRS Office, in Toronto, and believed a similar process could generate housing development plans.
The mastermind behind one of the proposed development schemes is The Living, a New York–based research group founded by David Benjamin and acquired by Autodesk in 2014. On a lush street lined with trees, bike lanes, and modest Dutch townhouses in the city of Alkmaar, 20 miles north of Amsterdam, a vacant, overgrown site is about to be turned into a housing development. But after years of tepid results, a number of companies are finally cracking the alchemy of algorithmic space planning. Like turning lead into gold, it seemed like a foolhardy endeavor that consumed many hopefuls. Humans have been trying to harness the power of computers to automatically generate building designs for decades.