Reflection

The final building growth wasn’t exactly what was expected if compared when we made the metro diagram. For example, the towers that arose containing the study space and library were one of the surprising shapes of the functions and yet it is still a valid and usable result. Besides this, most of the intended connections in the metro diagram came out as expected.

When trying to realize our intended connections and relations we took somewhat of a different approach. The general idea was that when two agents have euclidean proximity, they will most likely, if specified, also share network proximity. This is especially true because we generate the connections after the agents have grown. In our code we described the connections in our metro diagram as a starting point for the agents to grow close to one another. The main idea being that strong relation values between spaces in the REL chart have a stronger attractive force and thus grow closer to each other. These relation values correspond with the connections from the metro diagram. A more used connection in the metro diagram has a higher relation value in the REL chart.

In practise modeling connectivity like this also worked very well for most of the building. It can be seen that there are connection points from the residents houses to the garden, and from the garden to the hub. The library and music rooms share pathways and the hub is connected to these rooms, as well as to the community centre and coffee corner. The only major connections in the metro diagram that aren’t realized in the final building, are the one from the underground parking to the side entrance for the visitors and makerspaces to assisted living. A user would now walk through the garden, instead of using a direct corridor.

The reason for this is probably that the attractive force between these functions in the REL chart wasn’t great enough to let these agents grow in a closer proximity to one another. This resulted in there not being a viable path to be generated to and from these agents, so no direct connection was made. However, adding additional corridors at the end wouldn’t have been an ideal thing to do, seeing as the indirect routing is nearly just as fast and in practice more cost efficient.

The building grew the way it did based on our preferences and all of the functions ended up being accessible in a manner we generally wanted them to be. So in the end we think our reasoning and methods were a successful way of ‘growing a building’ for our intentions.

When looking at our main goal of designing a sustainable modular building system and our additional design goals, some things can be said. We like to think that the additional steps we took to create a modular system, from structural to flexible elements, gave the project an architectural value. We sought to explore an idea of how buildings could be made with flexibility and futureproofing as a departure point, and we believe we succeeded in both developing our own thought processes and delivering a suggestion for a concrete design. For next steps regarding feasibility, we would improve our CLT construction elements, details and materialization, but we are happy that the idea and form are a good basis for an actual building.

Having thought about the bigger scale of things and pressing issues like urban-densification, we are happy to end this project with an enthusiastic view of building design technology that could better shape the future of architecture and equip aspiring architects such as ourselves.