One-click Design With Grasshopper
Yining Shen
Below are three landscape drafts of the accessory park of the Hudson Yards. Please look at them and answer the following two questions:
- Which draft do you like most?
- These three drafts are by three individuals: a landscape architect, someone without any design background, and a grasshopper program. Can you guess which?
What I was trying to do here was a Turing test.
Can computers do better design than human designers?
Can people tell computer from human?
In the annual Turing test competition, computers uses their astonishing achievements as well as their equally fascinating failings to reveal our most human abilities: to learn, to communicate, to intuit, and to understand.
My project aims to program one design methodology that can be used to offer plans for landscape projects. With a number of preset inputs(site boundary, built environment, osm data), designers are asked to draw their drafts for the site. Three designers are given the job: a landscape architect professional, a tourist with no design education background, and my grasshopper program. They were asked not to add too many details, for my program has not been completely developed.
1 Pixelation
Both the site and its surrounding buildings are pixelated (for view analysis in this case). Lines(simulating the sight) connecting the center point of the buildings and the site are used to test whether the sight is blocked by obstacles. The panels that have the best views score the highest.
2.1 Zoning
The pixels are sorted into 3 categories to generate clear boundaries based on their scores. Those who score the highest(green) are better places for vegetation because they have better openness and healthy green can be seen by more people. Low-scored red indicating closure and privacy are better places for public events and placing public arts.
Green panels are clustered to generate smooth shapes.
2.2 Locating
Again, red in our site means something interesting. Red clusters are “must-go”s. I clustered the red pannels and located their center points. These points help decide a route inside the park.
3. Finding a route
A mesh web was created based on: 1. the must-go spots, 2. control points of the vegetation boundaries, and 3. the grid points.
Finally, the plug-in Shortest Path helped me decide on one major path.
And the path is smoothed.
The program worked well in the case of Lincoln Square. Still, it’s not a one-click process but requires a lot of adjusting. And we have to choose from the hundreds of options.
I did this project to show that computers can do design, though it has limitations.
References
To construct the model, I acquired .osm data from OpenStreetMap and MapPLUTO from NYC Planning’s Open Data portal.
- MapPLUTO — Shoreline Clipped (FGDB). NYC Department of City Planning. Last updated on Sep 31, 2021. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/open-data/dwn-pluto-mappluto.page
- OSM file around Hudson Yards. OpenStreetMap. Acquired on Feb 26, 2022. https://www.openstreetmap.org/
