Generative Design Using Traditional Dwelling Patterns and Digital Tectonics

Abstract

Asia’s vast variety of traditional dwellings are rich-cultured sources for space arrangements and architectural inspirations. Yet, in the midst of converging data and design influences, it has slowly lost its ground and true identity, commonly through incomprehensive and often misused data. The use of generated design, now a more commonly practiced, opens an opportunity towards a better synthesis of such cultural heritage. Gathering digital models and principal patterns of traditional dwellings to be used further offers another perspective to use the inherited ideas from traditional building.

Using Christopher Alexander’s Fifteen Rules in “The Nature of Order”, which are closely related to generative design, patterns are extracted from traditional dwellings as parameters and sets of rule for digital tectonics, to be simulated as means for generative design. A large collection parameters and digital tectonic are interchangeable and could benefit for architectural conservation using digital data.

The study will showcase an experiment of using such digital tectonics in patterns found on some villages in Indonesia which displayed intricate spatial patterns related to their activities. The experiment aimed on making digital tectonic models using algorithmic sets of codes and parameters regarding space arrangement. An approach using generative design methods should provide grounds for varieties of spatial arrangements, providing a new outlook for future dwelling design without abandoning their cultural root and enabling focus on other aspect of design. Multiple models, parameters, and sets of rules can be compiled as a bank of data, contributed digitally (using a repository), encouraging Architects and architectural academicians in a more collaborative way.