Towards Static and Dynamic Analysis of Architectural Elements

This research investigates two analysis techniques, static and dynamic, to analyze the architectural elements in an environment design. The placement of an architectural element within a building design has great impact on various factors like pedestrian flow and visibility of a certain area. In this work we study computer-aided systems to help architects to improve their environment designs. As a first step, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the effects of pillar placements, choice of crowd simulators and flow-density relationships in crowd evacuation scenarios using crowd flow as an objective criterion. Next, we describe the development of two interactive computer-aided systems, CODE and DOME. Both systems are capable of optimizing and analyzing different architectural elements like pillars, obstacles, door-openings and walls. CODE analyzes the architectural elements within an environment using dynamic crowd simulations, whereas DOME analyzes the environments by computing spatial measures from space-syntax analysis which directly relate to human behavior. DOME is integrated within a professional Autodesk Revit pipeline. Both systems are evaluated through user-studies.