Form-making with special effect simulations

Recent computational technologies expand the formal language of architecture and renew research in the nature of design creativity.While design outcomes often challenge established geometries and traditional architectural forms, they frequently converge on broader aesthetics of contemporary design, taking cues from other creative disciplines such as product design.While digitally inspired thinking allows for a broader reading of architecture, promoting innovative and unique designs as well as new expectations regarding its spatial, formal, and material characteristics, these emerging designs often exist exclusively as visual propositions, deprived of a deeper structural, constructional, or functional logic.Structural analysis software has helped engineers in calculating sophisticated structural models and understanding the intricacies of complex structural strategies.However, the ability to model such structures is seldom utilized in the development of architectural forms, and in everyday practice it rarely informs the design process or design criticism.Consequently, these two parallel activities (advanced structural modeling and architectural form making), while promising in their individual capabilities, have not yet been synthesized.The use of building information modeling (BIM) software has begun to integrate these processes; however, for the most part, designers and engineers continue to operate within classical, architectural-versusstructural paradigms.This still un-reconciled gap between architectural and engineering modes of production calls for further research into means and methods for the unification of the design approach.In an attempt to integrate these parallel developments, an emerging design approach uses computational building performance simulations to create a new relationship between building technology education and architectural design studio teaching.The renewed interest in building technology in general, and performance simulations in particular, sets new expectations for digitally based architectural education and practices.It sets an expectation for architecture to behave like a 21st-century structure, not merely be fashioned to look like one.Performancebased design is a particularly promising direction in regard to architectural generative processes in which a form can be not only evaluated based on the performance criteria, but also derived through the very process of simulation.Performance-based simulation is emerging as a critical component of the contemporary design process [1] [2], where it can function as a mechanism for the generative design validation.Performance-based simulations could facilitate human design by interactively responding to design parameters or function as semi-intelligent, self-optimizing agents that preselect promising generative scenarios and then channel them through a hierarchical portion of the design production (BIM software).The genetic algorithm (GA) [3] [4] and other evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are among the strategies that integrate structural analysis with architectural design.[5] For example, Schein and Tessmann have developed a procedure for the space truss optimization based on a collision detection analysis.However, this and similar tools are still in the developmental stages and are harder to implement in a classroom context to test complex designs.