Performance-Based Urban Massing Generation and Optimization: Incorporating building massing variations into green urban design

This paper introduces a design generation workflow for urban massing design optimization towards green urban design. This workflow incorporates building massing variations into the building layout generation process, which enables the exploration of the collective impact of building massing and building layouts on environmental performance through an integrated optimization process. The workflow is based on the building massing generation of EvoMass and enables the parameterized placement of multiple building massing blocks generated by EvoMass within a site boundary defined by the designer. The paper first elaborates on the workflow and its implementation on Rhino-Grasshopper as well as how it is integrated within the EvoMass toolkit. Furthermore, a demonstration is presented to showcase how this workflow and the associated design optimization can be applied to an urban design task. The result shows that the optimization can evolve the building massing forms and the building layout collaboratively to maximize performance enhancement. Finally, the paper discusses the relevance of this study to urban design optimization and points out limitations and future research directions.