Frank Petzold

Technical University of Munich | TUM · Department of Architecture / Informatics

Advanced construction techniques, such as additive manufacturing (AM) and modular construction, offer promising solutions to address labor shortages, reduce CO2 emissions, and enhance material efficiency. Despite their potential, the adoption of these innovative methods is hindered by the construction industry’s fragmented expertise. Building Infor...

Complex planning problems like the mobility transformation require the inclusion of stakeholders and situated knowledge. Generic map-viewers, surveys, or visualisations often fail to incorporate situated, complex, and contingent aspects of participatory negotiations-aspects which are more central to artistic, performative and analogue formats. In t...

Dystopic despair and utopian promises manifest a dichotomy dominating architectural and urbanistic discourses on digital technologies. This schism leaves only little room for critical-but-productive research and design perspectives. In this paper, we explore the figure of architectural science fiction to interrogate the historical roots, material d...

Entwicklung von Building Information Modeling basierten Lösungen für projektbezogene Kooperation in der Wertschöpfungskette vorgefertigter Holzbauten - Eine Handlungsempfehlung

Digital design has developed methods to address complex urban planning issues like the transformation of mobility using analytical tools and urban data. Simultaneously, such wicked problems require negotiation among involved stakeholders and situated knowledge. Even though contemporary City Digital Twin and urban data initiatives acknowledge this s...

ECPPM 2022

The benefits of design decision support systems (DDSSs) in the architectural planning context have been proven in research and are increasingly used in practice. The sense and purpose are apparent. The weighing of the most diverse ideas and approaches are required for design prob- lems that cannot be solved unambiguously and are characterized by co...

In order to meet the housing demands of the future, architects need to work faster and more efficiently while improving architectural quality. The metis projects aim to create an intelligent design assistant supporting architects during the early design stages through suggesting further design steps for spatial layouting, based on the best practice...

Digitale Werkzeuge können dazu beitragen, relevante Informationen und komplexe Zusammenhänge in Bezug auf den Klimawandel als Entscheidungsgrundlage für Planende und Verwaltung zur Verfügung zu stellen. Diese Handreiche soll die Einsatzmöglichkeiten solcher Methoden für Kommunen und Planende aufzeigen und beispielhafte Anwendungen Demonstrieren.

In engineering and architecture, different approaches have been developed that share the use of graph transformation to automate design processes or to search for design solutions by means of computational design synthesis. In order to give an overview of these approaches, we provide a review of articles published in the last decade. Forty-eight ar...

Der anhaltende Zuzug in bayerische Städte geht mit einer gesteigerten Nachfrage nach Wohnraum und hohem Druck auf Freiflächen einher. Parallel dazu steigt die Dringlichkeit von Klimaschutz und Klimaanpassung. Insbesondere die Sicherung und Entwicklung von Grüner Infrastruktur (Vegetation im Freiraum und an Gebäuden) bietet Potenziale zur Verbesseru...

The construction industry has long been labor-intensive, with slow productivity growth and a significant environmental impact. In this regard, the ever-increasing practices of additive manufacturing (AM) in construction have presented a variety of advantages and are deemed one of the critical technologies for the concept of Construction 4.0. Buildi...

Interim publication on the research project BIMwood: The use of digital tools and methods significantly changes planning and construction processes. Object-oriented, semantic building models tend to be used more and more in the design of industrially manufactured timber structures; production is characterised by advancing digital manufacturing. A...

The process of designing a building involves producing design concepts while fulfilling various requirements and regulations. Furthermore, during the project's life-cycle, multiple experts from multiple domains collaborate in developing the different partial models, including architectural, structural, and HVAC among others. Accordingly, clearly co...

Building Information Modeling (BIM) was conceived as a working method for networked planning using software assistance. Multiple stakeholders in the construction industry are involved in the design and management of digital representations of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility in the BIM model. Design variant management coup...

Within this paper we propose an interdisciplinary approach at the interface of computer science and architecture to predict design phases using a deep neural network, based on archi-tects' hand drawings. The overall goal of the metis projects is to provide architects with appropriate design step suggestions using deep learning (DL) and based on sem...

The project Crowd Safety – Including Pedestrian Flows and Security Aspects in Planning scrutinizes the inte- gration of agent-based simulations in the early design stages of architecture and urban design. On the one hand, it builds upon the microscopic pedestrian model crowd:it. On the other, the project uses the CDP // Collaborative Design Platfor...

The building design is a problem-solving process in which the demands of the customer are turned into a design job. Throughout the design process, several specialists from various fields cooperate to develop the final design. The key deliverables that are exchanged and passed over are the generated designs. However, no explanation of design intenti...

In the next thirty years, the world's population is expected to increase to ten billion people, posing major challenges for the construction industry. To meet the growing demands for residential housing in the future, architects need to work faster, more efficiently, and more sustainably, while increasing architectural quality. The hypothetical int...

Smart Cities are presented as a straightforward solution to diverse urban problems. On a closer look, however, the discourse on ‘Smart Cities’ seems wicked in various ways: vaguely defined, speculative, and fragmented into incommensurable positions. Focussing on this ‘wickedness,’ we explore the potential of design approaches to pervade the obscuri...

Microscopic agent-based simulations promise the meaningful inclusion of crowd dynamics in planning processes. However, such complex urban issues depend on a multiplicity of criteria. Thus, an isolated model cannot represent the walk of pedestrians meaningfully in planning contexts. This paper reframes crowd simulation as collaborative experimentati...

We present our interdisciplinary research on gamification as a communication tool in urban planning. Approaching the topic from a user-centered perspective, we combine knowledge from the domains of architecture and human-computer interaction and define domain-specific requirements and areas of interest. To substantiate our findings, we present a pr...

Das Bauen im Bestand (BiB) hat sich in Deutschland zu einem dominierenden Segment der Bautätigkeit entwickelt. Die Anwendung der BIM Methodik im Bestand stellt spezifische Anforderungen an die Prozesse, die Modellbildung und die eingesetzten Werkzeuge.

In engineering, design decisions in one domain exhibit multiple consequences in other domains. These consequences result from the often more or less hidden coupling between the different design domains. In order to examine these consequences, models need to be created. In practice, this is challenging due to the exchange of data between different e...

The COVID-19 pandemic has immense impact on our daily life. Precautions like facemasks and social distancing restrict the economy as well as the social life. The aim of the bachelor project was to support architects by integrating health specifications into a software environment and automatically derive specific design support by analyzing archite...

Contemporary agent-based pedestrian simulations offer great potential to evaluate architectural and urban design proposals in terms of medical risks, crowd safety, and visitor comfort. Nevertheless, due to their relative computational heaviness and complicated input-parameters, pedestrian simulations are not employed during the design process commo...

During the early phases of building design, the architects create many variants and make important decisions about different design aspects and details mostly based on their own experience and know-how. In order to reduce the risks brought by arbitrary decisions, a lot of effort was put into developing simulation tools. However, most of these simul...

In order to recommend architects design options, a system was developed which uses artificial intelligence (AI) methods of case-based reasoning (CBR) and deep learning. Since the system uses deep learning, it requires a sufficient amount of data for training, but currently, not enough amount of semantic building data is available publically. In thi...

The early stages of building design involve the consideration of different design variants and their assessment regarding various performance criteria including energy consumption and costs. During the design process, the involved experts from different disciplines frequently exchange building information to develop a design that satisfies the proj...

This article presents the results of the Urban Strategy Playground research group. Over the last 5 years, the focus of an interdisciplinary team of researchers was the conception, implementation and evaluation of a decision-support system for inner-city urban and architectural planning. The overall aim of past and ongoing research is to enable plan...

Embedding conductive material into 3D printed objects enables non-interactive objects to become tangible without the need to attach additional components. We present a novel use for such touch-sensitive objects in an augmented reality (AR) setting and explore the use of gestures for enabling different types of interaction with digital and physical...

The early stages of building design are characterized by a continuous endeavor for the development of variants and their evaluation and consistent detailing. The concept of adaptive detailing aims to enable the architect to evaluate and compare design variants which are partially incomplete and vague (Zahedi and Petzold 2018b). This paper discusses...

The early conceptual architectural design phases are characterized by a constant interplay of creating variants and assessment of those variants as well as their consistent detailing. Variant comparison plays a significant role in achieving the desired final building. Objectifiable criteria used for the evaluation and comparison of design variants...

This research aim is to develop a design support system for interactive exploration of urban space variants. During the early design process for urban masterplan, the design support system can evaluate the state of the design stage quickly and suggest alternative design variants to the designers. Design variants obtained while developing the design...

A continuous generation and evaluation of design variants characterize the conceptual architectural design stages. Variants comparison is a crucial process for making design-detailing decisions. Objectifiable criteria, including results of simulations and analysis, used for evaluation and comparison of design variants can legitimize decisions as th...

Nowadays Virtual Reality application are mostly used for the presentation and discussion of ideas. To enhance the discussion / creative process, participants require the possibility to make changes to the presentation. Similar to the established processes (e.g. model and sketch) a simultaneous editing of several users will occur in the virtual envi...

As the complexity of building tasks and requirements increases, designers often find themselves confronted with interdisciplinary problems that go beyond the specific challenges and methods of architecture. The iterative nature of the design process results in a continuous exchange between creative, analytical and evaluative activities, through whi...

Planning in the urban context is always a complex task in which the diverse interests ofdifferent stakeholdershave to be weighed up against each other. For this to happen, communication is the key leading to successful and sustainable solutions. Often objective factors like the number and diversity of participating stakeholdersis the benchmark for...

This paper focuses on finding new ways to facilitate the use of analytical and simulation tools during the important early phases of conceptual building design, where the digital models are partially incomplete. The necessary enrichment and proper detailing of the design model could be achieved through dialogue-based interaction concepts with analy...

The early design stages of urban planning have a great impact on indoor comfort and energy aspects. Alternative power supply options, based on solar potential, should be considered in the early stages of design, as they may constitute highly efficient substitutes. Existing software solutions for such simulations require higher level of detail from...

The paper presents the concept and results of a seminar that addresses the intersecting fields of architecture and urbanism, data and information visualization as well as information technology. In the first part of the paper, an introduction to the seminar topic and relevance in the context of architectural education and practice is given. Subsequ...

The paper describes the interdisciplinary course, Escaping Flatlands, focusing on improving communication between students, who were either from the field of architecture or media informatics and human-computer interaction. There were two underlying themes. The first, the integration and augmentation of digital media and haptic models, escaping the...

With recent advancements in VR (Virtual Reality) technology in the past year, it has emerged as a new paradigm in visual-ization and immersive HMI (Human-machine Interface). On the other hand, in the past decades, BIM (Building Information Modelling) has emerged as the new standard of implementing construction projects and is quickly becoming a nor...

Decisions taken at early stages of building design have a significant effect on the planning steps for the entire lifetime of the project as well as the performance of the building throughout its lifecycle (MacLeamy 2004). Building Information Modelling (BIM) could bring forward and enhance the planning and decision-making processes by enabling the...

Designers often carry out their work in the early design stages with disregard to prefabrication requirements, leading to poorly thought out design decisions in terms of precast concrete planning efficiency. If precast expertise could be integrated early into design schemes, this would improve design efficiency, reduce errors and misalignments, and...

Participation and communication in urban planning, visualisation, spatial perception, and motivation through gamification are discussed and system requirements derived. An augmented reality multi-client communication prototype is described improving transparency and utilising local expertise in planning processes. The selection, processing and visu...

Background Technological developments and globalized working processes have transformed the building process. However, current digital semantic building models no longer adequately represent the increasing complexity of modern building projects. The potential of combining agent-based and graph-based methods, for example for energy calculations or s...

The integration of energy and indoor comfort aspects into the early stage of urban planning is essential to conceive energy efficient urban structures and to avoid expensive compensation measures in the later building design. This could end up with increased insulation levels, complex air conditioning systems as well as increased energy demand duri...

The utilization of visual programming languages (VPL) as tools for generating complex simulations has seen a constant increase in application in architect planning phases. The major advantage of such languages is, that they enable the user to create programs without needing traditional software development skills. In the last few years the CDP // C...

Analyzing the results of multi-objective optimization and building performance simulation can be a very tedious process that requires navigating between different software and tools. There is a clear scarcity in visualization tools that combine methods for big data analysis and design decision support tools that integrate detailed information for e...

Europe is facing an increasing demand for new construction, which is pushing the industry away from traditional construction technology towards prefabrication and Mass-Customization. However, prefabrication-based construction requires a more efficient, better informed decision making process due to the increased difficulty of on-site variations. Fu...

The densification of urban spaces is a major challenge for future cities. With new forms of online consultation, we observe a movement towards open government in urban planning. A stronger participation between a more diverse body of players in a networked environment, is unveiling various discrepancies in the understanding of projects by the diffe...

This paper presents results of a user study into extending the functionality of an existing case-based search engine for similar architectural designs to a flexible process-oriented case-based support tool for the architectural conceptualization phase. Based on a research examining the target group’s (architects) thinking and working processes duri...

While computer-based design tools are widely used in architecure during late design phases for creating final floor plans, early design phases usually still take place in a traditional manner, using pen, paper and scissors. At the beginning of these phases, there is often only a rough idea of how a building should look like. Viewing existing floorp...

To support the early conceptualization phase in architecture with computer-aided solutions, in particular, with retrieval systems that can find similarly structured building designs in comprehensive collections of such designs, a number of approaches were presented to date. In the Metis project two retrieval coordination approaches (coordinators) w...

The use of digital tools in the early, creative design process is the focus of an interdisciplinary teaching and research project. Starting from the question of how a seamless connection between physical and digital tools could be made possible, the proposed method tries to bridge the gap between both methodologies and provide intuitive, visual and...

Semantic 3D city models provide an essential basis for the visualization and communication of planning measures, e.g. of densification strategies in inner-city areas. However, it appears that the simulation of amendments in the building codes and their impact on the built environment cannot be modeled efficiently in common city model schemata. In t...