Architecture
The influence of computational geometry in architecture is mainly
indirect but multifaceted, via computer
graphics for
architectural visualization, virtual reality
for simulated walkthroughs, computer aided design,
geographic information systems for land use planning,
and finite element methods for structural simulation
(see [Alexander, Black, and Tsutsui, "The Mary Rose Museum", Oxford
1995] for a nice example of a design informed by this last consideration).
However it seems likely that within each of those areas, special problems arise
in dealing with architectural information, and that more direct
connections can also be made.
- Biagio di Carlo,
geodesic architect.
- The
Computable City. M. Batty views urban growth through the lens of
the computer. With many pointers to related work.
- Darren Knight Gallery. Mesh generation meets architectural design.
- Fractals: New Ways
of Looking at Cities. M. Batty reviews an article in Nature
by Makse, Havlin and Stanley.
- GIS and CAD.
John Thomas describes Rochester's experience with the interface
between GIS (for large-scale geographic data) and CAD
(for smaller scale architectural information such
as street layout).
- Modeling
and rendering architecture from photographs, P. Debevec, C. Taylor,
and J. Malik, Berkeley.
- Moebius
architecture, C. Séquin, UC Berkeley. (Includes also a discussion
of software tools for analyzing building shapes.)
- MosaicExpress and Mosaïque 2000 PC software for designing and building tile mosaics, based
on square, hexagonal, triangular, and other tilings of the plane.
- Jeffry
Nimeroff works with both the Computer and Information
Science and Architecture depts. at U. Penn., on illumination
algorithms for architectural computer graphics.
- A
novel type of skeleton for polygons. Aichholzer, Alberts,
Aurenhammer, and Gärtner define the "straight skeleton", a
geometric construction resembling the medial axis and
potentially useful in defining rooflines of buildings.
(Warning: lots of incredibly annoying cookies.)
- Roofer subroutine
package for designing roofs from ground wall layout. Similar roof
design capability is also built into the
3D Home Architect
and Chief Architect
programs.
- Seth Teller
of MIT is constructing a database
of buildings in Cambridge Mass. Related algorithmic questions
include methods for combining image data from different
sources into a single 3d model, and data structures for fast rendering
of the resulting graphics.
- Sity.
Tom Kelly appears to be creating artificial cityscapes by using Voronoi diagrams of sites with lots of collinearity to form the city blocks and streets, similar Voronoi diagrams within the blocks to form property boundaries and building floorplans, and straight skeletons for the rooflines.
- Space Frame.
Forms and structures generated by identical triangles.
- A system for extracting morphological information from architectural drawings, C. Terzidis and E. Vakal, U. Michigan.
Similar work was also recently presented by B. Kernighan and C. Van Wyk at
the 1st ACM Worksh. Applied Computational Geometry.
- US
Patent 5211692 covers a decorative tiling pattern based on the
geometry of zonohedra. Patents
5155951 and
5448868 cover similar three-dimensional building systems.
- Virtual terrain
project: Roofs.
- Visualising
the structure of architectural open spaces based on shape analysis.
Sanjay Rana and Mike Batty use a simple greedy visibility calculation to
find lines of visibility for both building floorplans and urban areas.
- The WISE
wireless system engineering tool uses computational geometry
techniques developed by Steve Fortune of Bell Labs as part of a package
for predicting signal propagation of radio links inside buildings.
More information on the geometric problems arising here can be found
in Steve's paper "A beam tracing algorithm for prediction of indoor
radio propagation", in the 1st ACM Worksh. on Applied Computational Geometry.
- WWW Virtual Library: Architecture
Part of
Geometry in Action,
a collection of applications of computational geometry.
David Eppstein,
Theory Group,
ICS,
UC Irvine.
Semi-automatically
filtered
from a common source file.
