Parametric Urban Design
The goal for this initiative was to help develop and establish a methodology for leveraging the power of parametric modeling in the Chicago urban design studio.
Blackbox Studio selected Digital Project as the parametric modeling platform for this initiative. In addition to demonstrating how the native tools available in Digital Project can support the urban design process, Blackbox supplemented the “out of the box” capabilities with useful library objects and the ability to add new objects to the libraries. Blackbox also provided automated functions to track critical data which are subject to change as different iterations of a design concept are studied.
The process works as follows: The designer first sketches out a street grid, using basic sketch tools to draw linear and curvilinear street centerlines. Then street/ sidewalk “objects” are layered on top of the centerlines, using default settings for the street and sidewalk widths. Once the default streets are instantiated, their parametric widths can be adjusted via a simple user form. Next the designer can instantiate parcels by clicking on the boundaries of the parcel and then the land use parameter can be defined in another user form, which allows not only a number of different use-types, but also mixed uses. Finally, buildings can be instantiated on the parcels by sketching the footprint geometry of each building and then defining the constraints of the footprint, such as coincidence with a property line, or a certain distance away from an adjacent building, etc. After the footprint is constrained, the building can be extruded vertically by defining the number of floors and the floor-to-floor height. Finally, as with the parcels, the building’s use-type can be defined, including single use or some mixture of multiple uses.
The data that is automatically collected from the model includes total Built Up Area (BUA) for the entire site, BUA for each block, Floor Area Ratio's (FAR) for each parcel, areas of land by use-type, areas of building by use-type, and a number of other useful metrics. And being a fully parametric framework, when a street is moved or a block reshaped, the geometries of all the impacted streets, parcels, and buildings are automatically updated and all the tabulations are immediately recalculated, allowing for very efficient “what if” scenario testing.
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