Optimum Structural Patterns for Vertical Buildings

This paper investigates the optimality of non-routine regular and irregular structural patterns of different degrees of granularity for vertical buildings. Two approaches, based on two different computational methods, are used. The first is based on nonroutine regular patterns mostly found in nature and in recent building designs, and the second uses shape grammar for generating non-routine irregular patterns and the simulated annealing method to optimise the patterns. A multi-criteria decision making framework based on the Simple Additive Weighting method is used to evaluate the performances of the different regular patterns on the four decision criteria of efficiency, economy, expressiveness and environmental sustainability.