SpaceAnalysis: A Tool for Pathfinding, Visibility, and Acoustics Analyses in Generative Design Workflows

A growing number of architectural design efforts are making use of spatial metrics that characterize the experience of people in built environments. Metrics can make qualitative experience-related factors quantitative, and thereby assist in the exploration of a parametric or generative design space. To facilitate the adoption and development of generative design workflows, we introduce a tool called SpaceAnalysis that performs pathfinding, visibility, and acoustics analyses from which a variety of metrics can be computed. A theoretical contribution arising from this work is a new discretization method that converts 2D building geometry into a grid-based data structure supporting all three types of analyses. Experimental results show that the new method accommodates narrow corridors and small doorways with an efficient grid resolution of about 25 cm. We apply SpaceAnalysis to recreate and make publicly available a generative design workflow that was previously used to lay out a 250-person office.