Architecture Professor Wins NSF Grant to Develop Design Tools for Residential Housing
Taro Narahara, associate professor at the Hillier College of Architecture and Design, won a National Science Foundation I-Corps award for the development of flexible and intuitive design tools for multifamily residential housing.
This project proposes a platform for users to visually study possible housing complex designs and their potential performance in energy use intensity, environmental and some financial criteria based on preliminary sketches drawn by users.
“Our proposed tool can generate schematic designs of housing complexes with environmental performance estimations based on user-defined graphic sketches using our platform with intuitive interfaces,” said Narahara.
Because of the growing demands for housing complexes due to rapid urbanization in metropolitan areas, efficiency and speed are prioritized in the professional practice of designing commonplace housing complexes, he added.
Generative Apartment Sketcher is developed to be a system that can quickly generate and illustrate a design in a data-rich environment.
The project encourages architects and developers to focus more on creative and sustainable solutions by providing a platform that enables designers to effectively incorporate qualitative contributions from early exploratory stages into advanced design stages.
“Using our method, a diverse range of users, from novice designers to practitioners not only in architecture but also in real-estate development, could participate in the design process, allowing them to more effectively incorporate qualitative contributions from early phases of design into more developed phases.”
Narahara has won awards including the Peter Rice Prize, the Digital Design Prize, and the REAI Research Grant Award from Harvard University.
Tarahara notes that users in the architecture, engineering and construction industries have a long history of conceptualizing design graphically, utilizing standard architectural representation formats such as plans, sections and physical models, which are mostly static in nature.
“Our technology makes the schematic design and visualization of multifamily residential projects more accessible to users inexperienced with architectural design, such as developers or engineers, and significantly reduces the drafting work necessary for users already familiar with architectural design, such as architects,” he said.
His team includes ZhongMing Peter Zhang, a student completing his bachelor of architecture degree at HCAD and graduating in May, and Charles Portelli, vice president at Thornton Tomasetti’s CORE Studio and a licensed architect based in New York City.
Creating design tools that can facilitate the connection between early stages of visual thinking activity and more matured stages of development and refinement has been highly sought after. These tools have the potential to improve the quality of future housing complexes.
“We seek to encourage architects and developers to focus more on creative and sustainable solutions by providing a platform that enables designers to effectively incorporate qualitative contributions from early exploratory stages into advanced design stages,” he concluded.
