Geometry in Action: Architecture (original) (raw)

The influence of computational geometry in architecture is mainly indirect but multifaceted, via computer graphics for architectural visualization, virtual realityfor simulated walkthroughs, computer aided design,geographic information systems for land use planning, and finite element methods for structural simulation (see [Alexander, Black, and Tsutsui, "The Mary Rose Museum", Oxford 1995] for a nice example of a design informed by this last consideration). However it seems likely that within each of those areas, special problems arise in dealing with architectural information, and that more direct connections can also be made.

• Biagio di Carlo, geodesic architect.
• The Computable City. M. Batty views urban growth through the lens of the computer. With many pointers to related work.
• Darren Knight Gallery. Mesh generation meets architectural design.
• Fractals: New Ways of Looking at Cities. M. Batty reviews an article in _Nature_by Makse, Havlin and Stanley.
• GIS and CAD. John Thomas describes Rochester's experience with the interface between GIS (for large-scale geographic data) and CAD (for smaller scale architectural information such as street layout).
• Modeling and rendering architecture from photographs, P. Debevec, C. Taylor, and J. Malik, Berkeley.
• Moebius architecture, C. S�quin, UC Berkeley. (Includes also a discussion of software tools for analyzing building shapes.)
• MosaicExpress and Mosaïque 2000 PC software for designing and building tile mosaics, based on square, hexagonal, triangular, and other tilings of the plane.
• Jeffry Nimeroff works with both the Computer and Information Science and Architecture depts. at U. Penn., on illumination algorithms for architectural computer graphics.
• A novel type of skeleton for polygons. Aichholzer, Alberts, Aurenhammer, and Gärtner define the "straight skeleton", a geometric construction resembling the medial axis and potentially useful in defining rooflines of buildings. (Warning: lots of incredibly annoying cookies.)
• Roofer subroutine package for designing roofs from ground wall layout. Similar roof design capability is also built into the3D Home Architectand Chief Architectprograms.
• Seth Tellerof MIT is constructing a database of buildings in Cambridge Mass. Related algorithmic questions include methods for combining image data from different sources into a single 3d model, and data structures for fast rendering of the resulting graphics.
• Sity. Tom Kelly appears to be creating artificial cityscapes by using Voronoi diagrams of sites with lots of collinearity to form the city blocks and streets, similar Voronoi diagrams within the blocks to form property boundaries and building floorplans, and straight skeletons for the rooflines.
• Space Frame. Forms and structures generated by identical triangles.
• A system for extracting morphological information from architectural drawings, C. Terzidis and E. Vakal, U. Michigan. Similar work was also recently presented by B. Kernighan and C. Van Wyk at the 1st ACM Worksh. Applied Computational Geometry.
• US Patent 5211692 covers a decorative tiling pattern based on the geometry of zonohedra. Patents5155951 and5448868 cover similar three-dimensional building systems.
• Virtual terrain project: Roofs.
• Visualising the structure of architectural open spaces based on shape analysis. Sanjay Rana and Mike Batty use a simple greedy visibility calculation to find lines of visibility for both building floorplans and urban areas.
• The WISE wireless system engineering tool uses computational geometry techniques developed by Steve Fortune of Bell Labs as part of a package for predicting signal propagation of radio links inside buildings. More information on the geometric problems arising here can be found in Steve's paper "A beam tracing algorithm for prediction of indoor radio propagation", in the 1st ACM Worksh. on Applied Computational Geometry.
• WWW Virtual Library: Architecture

Part ofGeometry in Action, a collection of applications of computational geometry.
David Eppstein,Theory Group,ICS,UC Irvine.

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