A Case Study on Generating Eco-Conscious Office Building Designs Using a Data-Informed Optimization Framework

The scrap-and-build design culture (the culture favoring knocking down and re-building buildings rather than remodeling, renovating, or re-using) has often been criticized in discussions about how to reduce the environmental impacts of office buildings. Therefore, we present a case study on generating eco-conscious office building designs, which will enable them to easily convert in the future, using our data-informed optimization framework. This framework was developed to improve the accuracy of the floor plan generation; the model that is integrated into the framework outputs the total cosine similarity between each generated floor plan and the referred plans dynamically selected from our dataset and the framework maximizes it. To generate more flexible floor plans for conversion, this paper elaborates on a way to create a dataset and formulation for optimization. Finally, we demonstrated the efficiency of the framework and described the optimized parameters that are important dimensions for eco-conscious office building designs.