Generative Design for Smart Regulations

The so-called Right to Light in Great Britain, the European standard EN 17037 “Daylight in Buildings”, and similar design codes or standards of good practice provide recommendations for ensuring the rights of property owners to receive sunlight, daylight, sky view, and alike. In view of the possibility of installing solar panels on buildings, the same rights can also be seen as a basis for the renewable energy capture potential of buildings. In relatively dense urban contexts, not only the spatial context is typically occluding the sky view and thus restricting the sunlight hours of buildings, but also the building itself becomes an occlusion to its neighbourhood and even itself. Thus in a turn from normative design regulations concerned with giving static directives as to what needs to be done to guarantee adherence to standards, we propose to generate the design guidelines in the form of an environmental envelope for a building based on what needs to be attained in terms of solar-climatic requirements and goals. The idea is to develop a computational methodology and implement it as a tool either:

• in the context of the Netherlands where the 3D geo-information is already available as open data (e.g. the 3D BAG dataset)
• in the context of a country without such 3D city models being available, by using Digital Surface Models (DSM) from global Earth Observation data sets (such as those from the ESA or DLR)