Getting Started
Redesign Renzo Piano’s Float Building in 5 minutes.
Intelligent Design and Planning with Digital Blue Foam
How will emerging digital technologies play a fundamental role in shaping the cities of tomorrow? Cesar Cheng shows you how.
At Digital Blue Foam we recognize that many cities across the globe are unprepared to face the challenges of rapid urban growth. For this reason, we bring together a set of technologies to help address bigger challenges -in less time- while making informed decisions in order to build the cities of tomorrow.
Large-Scale Urban Solutions
We live in an age of cities. Demographers have forecasted that by 2050 an additional 2.5 billion people will live in cities. The scale and the rapid pace at which this transformation have taken place over the past decades are unprecedented and present a new set of challenges that needs to be urgently addressed.
In order to respond to these challenges, we need to be able to come up with large-scale urban solutions that create higher-quality environments, that consciously use resources, and that can be deployed fast for the benefit of many.
If we continue to work at the scale of the individual building, the impact will be too limited. And, if planning takes too long, solutions will come too late.
Large-scale urban projects are major drivers of urban renewal for many cities around the world. In many areas where land is becoming scarce and population density is increasing, these large-scale urban projects may be instrumental for creating the rapid and coordinated transformation that are needed to address some of our urbanization challenges.
These large-scale projects, often referred as grand projects or megaprojects, can be found around the world. Some examples include: Hudson Yards in New York; King’s Cross in London; the Marina Bay area in Singapore; West Kowloon in Hong Kong; HafenCity in Hamburg; MedienHafen in Dusseldorf … and the list goes on.
Not surprisingly, given the scale and the amount of resources needed to develop these projects it took years if not decades of planning to develop them.
Today, the game is changing! We at Digital Blue Foam are building a platform that will provide users with the tools they need to play this game differently. By making use of the latest advances in digital technology, working collaboratively through cloud-based platforms, and harnessing the power of computational design, we can scale-up, address more complex problems, and leverage large datasets to make informed decisions faster than ever before.
Getting Started
We will look at a site in MedienHafen in Dusseldorf, a large-scale urban redevelopment project that is now home to more than 700 offices, restaurants, hotels, and event venues, which is transforming what was once an industrial area into a tourist destination and city-hub for media, design and fashion companies.
We will use Digital Blue Foam to look at multiple design scenarios for approaching large-scale urban development projects.
First let’s go to the site
Once you type in the city, you can search for your site in a the map and define the working area for your project.
Now that we have defined the site, we can start to look at possible design options.
1. Let’s max-out the site.
To begin, we need to set some constraints to run the model. Just to have a reference for our future design options, let’s look at a base-option where we decide to maximize built-area.
Click on the “Calc-icon” on the carousel wheel to open the stats panel. On the left side we can play with the program distribution slider. Here we can set some design constraints for our project:
2. Let’s subdivide the site.
Now we can look at generating multiple buildings on the site by changing the number of subplots. Here I am dividing the site into 2, 3 and 4 subplots to generate design solutions with multiple buildings:
OK! This is starting to look more real.
We can also control the height range for my buildings setting up a [minimum to maximum] height.
This is looking a lot more interesting!
We have arrived at a design solution similar to Renzo Piano’s project. Let’s keep playing to see what other options we can generate.
3. Let’s play with other building block types.
We can also try out different building types in our search for a good design solution. Once we find a promising option we can save it for comparison later.
The courtyard solutions seem to be a good candidate. We can save this option by clicking the “save” button, which will be stored in our “saved solutions panel”. We can access it later to get more detailed metrics and compare the solutions against each other.
4. Drawing with the Pen Tool
The Pen Tool is one of the most powerful features of Digital Blue Foam. This tool allows the designer to work intuitively, making design decisions that only a human can make while letting the computer run calculations to generate design solutions.
With the Pen Tool, we can decide where the site should be divided, how to connect to the existing street network, or what areas should be dedicated to parks and public space.
Let’s see how we can manually create a park for our design solution. In order to do this, we need to delete one of the blocks and turn the empty subplot into a park.
To delete a block, we first need to click on the block to select it, then go to the right panel and click the “Delete” button. Similarly, to change a program, just open the dropdown menu, select a program, and click “Submit”.
Now that we have a park, we need to replace the area we lost somewhere else. We can select another block and make it into a taller tower.
5. Fine-tuning design solutions
Sometimes we will want to manually select a given block and assign a particular type of program. On other occasions, we may want to stack our blocks in a particular sequence and be more specific about how many stories each block should have.
Split Program
To do these operations and fine-tune our design solution, we can use the “Split” option to separate our block into 2 blocks. Then we can assign a particular program to each block before specifying how many stories each block should have.
As we can see in the model above, the first tower has some levels of commercial(lightblue) space at the bottom and residential(blue) levels on the top. The second tower, right after the park, starts as an office(yellow) tower. Here I am splitting the office tower into two blocks, assigning the residential program to the top block and commercial program to the bottom block.
Finally, I would like to be more specific about how I distribute the program in this tower. I am assigning the exact number of levels I want each block of program to have. In this case, the two bottom levels will be for commercial space, followed by some office and residential levels on top.
Move, Scale and Rotate
We can also do basic design operations to our building blocks such as “Move”, “Scale”, and “Rotate”. Sometimes, we may want to add or transform our buildings in order to fine-tune our design solution. For a variety of reasons, we may want to have building set-backs in order to comply to zoning regulations, define transitions in program, or create terraces and open air spaces.
Building Set-Backs
For example, let’s have a set-back on the commercial block at the base of the buildings. In order to scale a block, we need to select the block and press the “+” or “-” key on our keyboard.
Similarly, we can partition the tower into a series of tiers using the “Split” tool and scale down the blocks to create building set backs at any level.
Moving Blocks
Sometimes we may need to move our blocks and stack them in a particular way. In order to move the blocks around, we need to select the block and use the arrow keys on the keyboard to position our blocks in a desired configuration.
Building Rotation
Sometimes we may want to orient our building in a particular direction. We can fine-tune our design solution to achieve better views, or take advantage of solar exposure by rotating the building blocks. To do this, we will need to select the block we want to rotate, and press “<” and “>” keys on our keyboard. To control the step of the rotation we can press “shift” + “<” .
6. Environmental tools
Another strong Digital Blue Foam feature is its set of environmental analysis tools. This feature helps designers to quickly evaluate their design against environmental factors.
We can find the environmental analysis tools on the top right of the carousel wheel. These set of tools allows us to integrate environmental information from an early stage of the design process without having to switch platforms, rely on plug-ins, or ask specialists.
We can bring up the sun-path and wind-rose diagram to take a look at how our design solutions respond to the environment.
In addition, we can also run a radiation analysis for each of our design solutions. This analysis allows us to look at sunlight levels all year round.
We have covered some of the key Digital Blue features.
Digital Blue Foam has built a user-friendly interface that allows designers to co-create design solutions on the computer. It brings together a set of analytical and generative design tools, allowing designers to explore more alternatives, save time, and make better decisions during the early stages of a project.
N O T E S
- Stephen Cairns, Devisari Tunas (eds.), ETH Future Cities Laboratory, Indicia 01 page 51–53.
- https://www.facebook.com/renzopianobuildingworkshop/posts/3415159015222063/
About the author:
Cesar Cheng works as Product Designer at Digital Blue Foam. His work focuses on the digital transformation of the AEC industries with particular interest in computational design, AI, data collection and visualization for applications in digital solutions for the built environment.
