In nearly every case, when a user is drawing a wall they will eventually end up with a room. Why not start with the room as the first order of thinking?
Well, here is why. In elemental systems like CAD and BIM there is no concept of embedded intelligence. These systems are records of design having been done hundreds of thousands of times, but only with the final result of what the designer intended.
I posit that as an architect, designing the same bedroom the same way 2000 times might get a bit repetitive. What about the same vanity – toilet – tub arrangement found in 90% of bathrooms? Surely a bathroom can be fully intelligent, for the building codes regulate nearly all of a bathrooms makeup. Why did I, for example, need to design the same kitchen 25 times, when the only difference was slight dimensional adjustments to the kitchen’s bounding box. I wish I would have recorded every possible combination of casework-sink-dishwasher-fridge that there is, and then future me could call that logic, like Thor, the next time I need to design a kitchen.
If you start with rooms, then I think the problem of “Automating Architecture” becomes an order of magnitude more easier. In fact one could build a room based configurator, per room.
Cliftons Top 10 Room Configurators (the top 2 are the most valuable)
- Bathroom – Powder rooms with vanities on top of the toilet tank -> 100 persons capacity at a stadium
- Kitchen – Ranging from kitchenette to fully fledged commercial kitchens
- Bedroom – Crib and standard all the way to King sized beds
- Living Rooms – Solve for couch yield – how much couch can I get, given I need a table and a TV?
- Dining Room – Like every dynamic block ever has chairs arraying into place as the user makes the table bigger.
- Office – WFH study all the way to WeWork levels of space
- Garage – Cars, gotta actually place the cars
- Closet – Storage can go from shallow pantry to luxury walk in closets
- Utility Room – In your home it might have a laundry machine. In a skyscraper it will have a massive generator so the elevators wont get stranded
- Entry – The portal into a hobbit hole all the way to the Iris device that covers the stargate. Sequence and scale held high.
The system would run on requirements, and would need to solve all kinds of unique conditions within all of the room based bounding boxes.
If this is the way we build our database, then I could, say, with software make sure that walls attached to fire-rated spaces like a garage would always be fire-rated. Not because a user manually set a wall type to be fire-rated, but because the user set the garages to be fire-rated. Or in a kitchen the wall type behind a skink automatically grows into a plumbing wall. The room requirements often are linked to even more services.
Looks like we are forgetting electrical services too, which is unfortunately (or fortunately) governed by code, with ways of mitigating plugmageddon, but in general this is how bad it could get:
This idea on a larger building scale can work for walls… If there is a combustable element, give me a fire rating. If there is a vertical exit component to this room. give me a fire rating. If I label the room “sound studio” automatically juice my walls for larger STC ratings. If my building is geolocated in the southwest, give me a higher R rating. If my windows are placed to the west, push them as low on the wall as possible. The ideas are endless.
We will get to making sure that wall going around the garage actually is a fire rated assembly in some later blog post.