Abstract
The aim of this tool called Formseeker was to interactively show user the potential of locality in terms of building-in free spaces, with minimum handling and need of doing anything. Few of the wished-aims were full-filled. The tool works as a nearly automatic height and distance seeker in the urbanism structure, user controls few criteria as: creating and setting the seeking curve – shape that will be used as a “magnifying glass” that will show possibilities inside the city, area size scaler – for easy size managing of location of interest, offset of the evaluation area from the area of interest – because selected area needs context, number of evaluated points – points which will later be indicating the height on dependencies – distance from surrounding obstacles and windows height level – because windows to living rooms aren’t on the ground every time.
Main criteria
Inspiration was took in Prague’s building criteria’s (in Czech: PSP – Pražské stavební předpisy). Basically, there were two conditions that limits and challenge the potential – first: horizontal distance from other surrounding objects, second: cut plane in 45° angle from horizontal level. Cut plane starts at the windows level height – as that angle is evaluated from room that can be habitable.
Use cases
In the process of designing the functions I realized, that the script is not necessarily showing potential of building, but could be used as design tool for landing trees on free spaces in the city.
Use examples
Limitations
As previously shown on some examples, Formseeker still has a few flaws, the main is that the windows level is in changeable yet constant height to terrain – if you have one office building on one side and residential building on the other, you still have to count windows of the office building, so you won’t be able to build taller.
Logic
Curve is floating above the terrain, it does have points inside itself – evaluation points – they “rain” onto the terrain, because we need context, larger offset area is made, from its surface brep is going down to make 3D area in which all points are selected and then used for evaluation. Windows height plane coplanar to terrain, to simulate height of windows on real terrain. from this surface/level the 45 º are cutting the height of evaluated points – seemingly – 45º does have that nature, that horizontal and vertical distance are equal, so for easiness, there are no cutting planes, but distance from other building is added to window height and that makes height of on one column.
Script
Script for now does not feature any non-original components and functions. Script is divided in few sections – user interface, setting of the seeking area – area of interest, setting of the evaluation area in the form of brep, deselection of unwanted elements outside the area of evaluation – brep, setting of evaluation points, setting of evaluating points from surrounding’s, making of the windows height level and finally setting of evaluation and it’s visualization in the forms of columns.
In the user interface user needs to setup the seeking curve, the mesh of surrounding obstacles – buildings and mesh of terrain.
I designed also the same script, with difference, that user do not need to assign any mesh, only seeking curve – so it is completely automatic, problem is, that the script is too heavy, so I keep it for future, list feature works in a way, that terrain mesh is filtered based on its size – it is big as all of the buildings together, when not separated.
Thanks to Šimon Prokop for giving me the complete usable model of Prague city.