Solar Form Optimization
In this study, a hypothetical 300-meter tower form was generated as part of an automated solar optimization process. The tower was sited in an urban context with a heavy amount of contextual shading, and the goal of the optimization process was to find the tower form that maximized the amount of incident solar on the surface of the building. Simultaneously, BlackBox Studio was interested in minimizing the total surface area and maintaining a target gross floor area for the entire building.
The building geometry was controlled by elliptical floor plan profiles at five different floors up the height of the building. The axis lengths of the ellipses were variables, as were the x and y coordinates of the ellipse center points, allowing for a large degree of variation in the overall tower form.
BlackBox used a custom-written genetic algorithm to search for solutions and also used a commercially-available optimization program.
Given this multiple-objective problem, the results of the optimization yield a Pareto front of best-performing possibilities. Selecting individual solutions along the front allows the designer to sample various tower forms that have different biases in their performance measures and different taxonomies of well-performing shapes.
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