Sven Schneider

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar · Computer Science in Architecture (InfAR)

The European timber industry has successfully implemented the cascading utilization of wood for several decades, downcycling material resources at the end of each product cycle by turning them into new industrial commodities through additional manufacturing procedures. In its current implementation, this approach is effective in keeping wooden mate...

The implementation of multi-space concepts in office buildings is a challenge for architects in early design phases. Activity-based work programmes require a user-specific demand analysis of the company based on employee profiles in order to be able to determine zone relationships, areas and other requirements. The multitude of factors results in c...

Despite the apparent benefits of machine learning (ML), for many practical applications, with architecture being no exception, the current bottleneck limiting its full potential is not the amount but the quality of available data.We argue that in order to increase the quality of floor plan data sets, we need a priori approach to feature selection....

Currently, the timber industry in the European Union incinerates up to 80% of its waste wood, releasing its embodied CO2 into the atmosphere while producing energy. This practice also affects offcuts, a waste material from structural timber production, mostly because of aesthetic imperfections. However, there are potential architectural use cases f...

The increasing density of urban spaces and buildings is undermining public health. To compensate, there is a growing trend towards biophilic design, including at one of the most frequented and highly functional sites: railway stations. Previous studies have confirmed the economic feasibility of station greenery and users' preference for this but al...

This paper presents a method for organising urban data inside the CAD environment into a hierarchical structure, which promotes the ease of transferring information between all available urban elements, from streets to buildings passing by the plots and blocks. This is done using parametric methods that map the urban data using the available CAD an...

In this paper we present the experiences of integrating Virtual Reality based User Studies into a one-semester architectural design studio. The goal of this studio was to equip students with knowledge and methods for more systematically describing and evaluating user-centered qualities. The design task was on a new train station for a small German...

New advances in user studies within Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) have made possible highly immersive Pre-Occupancy Evaluations (Pr-OEs) during the architectural design process. However, there remains a lack of easy methods for integrating these IVE-based user studies into design development phases while also providing reliable data-driven...

User-centered studies in Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are able to provide valuable feedback in the form of Pre-Occupancy Evaluations (Pr-OEs). Pr-OEs allow for immersive design reviews of architectural space before construction is complete, thus providing better opportunities for user-centered values to be appraised and addressed by design...

The existing train station for the town of B (anonymized) in Germany is planned to be replaced with a new building. Three architectural design options have been developed in a student design studio, which differ in spatial configuration and architectural expression. With an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) based user study, the advantages and di...

In this paper, we discuss a few methods for mapping the location of urban activities. We focus on establishing the geometrical relationship between the frontages of urban activities and their morphological context. Frontages act as the interface between the users of the public space and the activities within its surrounding buildings. Studying how...

New digital algorithms support architects by partially automating the generation and analysis of design variants in multi-storey residential building construction.

Digitalization is changing the way cities are planned. Technological innovations in AI and data analysis are leading to new design strategies and processes in which urban designers must constantly redefine their role in the interaction with digital tools. In this chapter, we demonstrate how various generative and analytical methods can be used to c...

This study discusses the interplays between urban form and energy performance using a case study in Singapore. We investigate educational urban quarters in the tropical climate of Singapore using simulation-based parametric geometric modelling. Three input variables of urban form were examined: street network orientation, street canyon width, and b...

Der Beitrag beschreibt neue Möglichkeiten für den Einsatz von Methoden der Künstlichen Intelli-genz in Architektur und Städtebau-und steckt diesbezüglich die Grenzen des Machbaren ab. Die Autorinnen und Autoren stellen dar, wie diese Methoden die Arbeitswelten von Architektinnen und Architekten verändern. Sie beleuchten, wie die kreative Nutzung ne...

This study discusses the relationship between urban morphology and energy performance. We investigate educational urban quarters in the tropical climate of Singapore using simulation-based parametric geometric modelling. Three input variables of urban form were examined: street network orientation, street canyon width, and building depth. In total,...

Climate emergency urges the reduction of CO2 emissions. Energy is the major contributor to climate change, and the building sector accounts for a large share of rising global energy consumption. Previous research has shown a strong interplay between urban form and energy consumption. The transition towards net-zero cities is challenged by the space...

RaumPlanung: Fachzeitschrift für räumliche Planung und Forschung. Digitalisierung verändert die Art und Weise wie Städte geplant werden. Technologische Neuerungen der KI und der Datenanalyse führen zu neuen Planungsstrategien und -prozessen, bei denen Architekt*innen und Planer*innen ihre Rolle im Zusammenspiel mit digitalen Werkzeugen immer wied...

Overview “We are living in the age of cities. It is an urgent time, and an uncertain one. Never before have human beings built so much with such haste. Yet we understand so little about how our urban world grows and — sometimes — declines.” Thus wrote Anthony M Townsend, then a Senior Research Fellow at the New York University (NYU) Rodin Centre fo...

One of the most important consequences of digitalization and the progress of artificial intelligence is automation in all areas of life. In this paper we investigate the automation of urban design. Based on four levels of automation, we provide a conceptual framework for the classification and comparison of various urban design automation approache...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a new developed parametric workflow for efficient semi-automatic generation of design options for multi-family residential buildings. The generation process is performed by modular components that generate design variants for building volumes automatically but enable the user to combine them in the preferred...

The emerging countries are confronted by an unprecedented wave of urbanization, which seeks rapid urban planning and sustainable development. A typical example is Ethiopia where the need for economic growth, food security, water, energy and social infrastructure is being fostered. To achieve this Ethiopian government plans to develop a large number...

For architects as well as developers and urban planners working on the floor plans or estimating the shape and dimensions of large buildings is always a challenge. This task requires some knowledge and what is more important – even with understanding of the process it is a very time-consuming task. One should take into consideration the arrangement...

The DeCodingSpaces Toolbox for Grasshopper is a collection of analytical and generative components for algorithmic architectural and urban planning. The toolbox is free software released by the Computational Planning Group (CPlan) and is a result of long term collaboration between academic institutions and praxis partners across the globe with the...

There are a lot of discussions about digitalizing university teaching and opening it to civil society. In this context, we investigate the current options for setting up and distributing video-based online courses. First, we make a review of a subjectively selected set of existing platforms and technologies for video-based online courses. Next, we...

In this paper, we introduce a simulation framework for examining the effect of street network configurational on the evolution of the relationship between movement and land use allocation over time. The causal chain introduced in Space Syntax literature suggests that the potential generated by spatial configuration of a street network influences ho...

This paper discusses a novel approach for artificial coral reefs. In our case study-pursued at the shoreline of Gili Trawangan (Indonesia)-we present new methods and techniques for their design and fabrication, and, ultimately, to enable regrowth of damaged coral reefs. Of particular importance is the use of underwater laser scanning and underwater...

Urban development projects in flood-prone areas are usually complex tasks where failures can cause disastrous outcomes. To tackle this problem, we introduce a toolbox (Spatial Resilience Toolbox-Flooding, short: SRTF) to integrate flooding related aspects into the planning process. This, so called toolbox enables stakeholders to assess risks, evalu...

This research proposes a framework for signal processing and information fusion of spatial-temporal multi-sensor data pertaining to understanding patterns of humans physiological changes in an urban environment. The framework includes signal frequency unification, signal pairing, signal filtering, signal quantification, and data labeling. Furthermo...

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods t...

The purpose of the two exploratory studies presented in this paper was to examine the relations between formal representations of an urban environment and subjective responses. In Study 1, we examined how geometrical features were related to environmental appraisal of an urban square. We mapped movement trajectories and activities on the square dur...

In this paper we introduce mineR-a tool that integrates statistical data analysis inside the parametric design environment Grasshopper. We first discuss how the integration of statistical data analysis would improve the parametric modelling workflow. Then we present the statistical programming language R. Thereafter, we show how mineR is built to f...

http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/paper/ecaade2018_292 Urban water systems need to be dimensioned well to be economical and distribute water in a good quality to all consumers. Their pipe sizes are dependent on demand and location of consuming nodes. Within uncertain development of cities, planning sustainable hydraulic networks is challeng...

A common approach to evaluating the quality of urban environments in terms of walkability is to measure the accessibility of walking attractors. For this purpose, the information on street network configuration and distribution of walking attractors is required. However, in the early planning stages when not all the necessary data on land use alloc...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used for buildings, however, mostly for post-design evaluation of the environmental impact. To use the results for optimization, LCA has to be integrated in the early design stages. While Building Information Modelling (BIM) is more and more applied in detailed design stages, simple 3D models are typicall...

Dynamic urban development simulation models are usually separate to urban planning tools making it difficult to test the consequences of urban planning variants directly without switching between expert tools. This paper presents an approach to integrating system dynamics simulation at various scales and abstractions in the visual programming envir...

Die Bahnhofsplanung zielt darauf ab, einen möglichst angenehmen Aufenthalt für Reisende zu gewährleisten, Stauungen von Menschenmassen an engen Stellen im Raum zu vermeiden und einen effizienten Bewegungsfluss zu ermöglichen. Je komplexer, größer und multi-funktionaler der Bahnhof jedoch ist, desto schwieriger ist es jedoch für die Planer, eine akk...

Designing pleasant, sustainable cities is a long-term goal of urban design researchers and practitioners alike. Since changes to existing streets and buildings are hard to implement once constructed, evaluations are iteratively needed in the early design stages. However, urban designers may find it challenging to anticipate how future inhabitants p...

In emerging countries there is a need for rapid urban planning, since they are confronted by unprecedented wave of urbanization. This need is even bigger since usually there is no adequate number of professional educated urban planners in these countries. Therefore, we investigate in this paper how to develop a set of methods that allow to generate...

In this research project, we investigate the impacts of urban morphology (UM) on citizen’s social potential as a function of accessibility and perception and compare it with the impacts of UM on building energy consumption for parallel case studies in Zürich Switzerland and Weimar Germany. This is of particular interest since urban planning decisio...

This paper presents a new open-source structural analysis plugin for Grasshopper – RhinoRstab. The plugin bridges data between the worldwide established software: Rhinoceros3d and Dlubal RSTAB. The basic idea behind the approach is to create an interactive workflow between the architectural design on the one hand and a structural analysis tool on t...

The design as a process is not a new topic in architecture, yet some theories are widely unexplored, such as the multi-stage decision-making (MD) process. This design method provides multiple solutions for one design problem and is characterized by design stages. By adding new building components in every stage, multiple solutions are created for e...

Floor plan retrieval for supporting design by suppliance of reference objects requires comparable information in understandable categories. Spatial properties of floor plans are objectively comparable, but hard to relate to subjectively perceived verbal demands toward a searched-for spatial configuration in a digital reference repository. In thi...

Thuringia -a federal state in Germany- is characterized by a low-density settlement structure with 65% of its urban population living in cities with less than 25,000 inhabitants. In order to develop plans for the future of this region of Germany, it is necessary to understand how such small cities work, and how their spatial structure influences th...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly gaining importance in regards to building sustainability evaluation. Life Cycle Performance (LCP) describes the sum of all expenses for the production, operation and deconstruction in relation to the use and lifespan of a building. Considering LCP at the very early stages of the design process can have a...

The described study aims to find correlations between urban spatial configurations and human emotions. To this end, the authors measured people’s emotions while they walk along a path in an urban area using an instrument that measures skin conductance and skin temperature. The corresponding locations of the test persons were measured recorded by us...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is becoming more and more important for building sustainability evaluation. However, in architectural practice LCA is not carried out in early design stages although the consideration of the environmental life cycle performance (LCP) is essential for creating sustainable buildings and early design stages offer the highes...

Das Erzeugen räumlicher Konfigurationen ist eine zentrale Aufgabe im architektonischen bzw. städtebaulichen Entwurfsprozess und hat zum Ziel, eine für Menschen angenehme Umwelt zu schaffen. Der Geometrie der entstehenden Räume kommt hierbei eine zentrale Rolle zu, da sie einen großen Einfluss auf das Empfinden und Verhalten der Menschen ausübt und...

The described study aims to find correlations between urban spatial configurations and human emotions. To this end, the authors measured people’s emotions while they walk along a path in an urban area using an instrument that measures skin conductance and skin temperature. The corresponding locations of the test persons were measured recorded by us...

By extending Fechner's Method of Production, we investigate the relationships between urban form and spatial experience using an experimental Virtual Reality setup that allowed participants (N=102) to create three-dimensional, environmental scenes in real time. Participants could adjust five independent parameters (building height, building width,...

By extending Fechner's Method of Production, we investigate the relationships between urban form and spatial experience using an experimental Virtual Reality setup that allowed participants (N=102) to create three-dimensional, environmental scenes in real time. Participants could adjust five independent parameters (building height, building width,...

Im vorliegenden Buch sind die Ergebnisse eines studentischen Entwurfsprojektes dokumentiert, welches im Wintersemester 2012/13 an der Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar am Lehrstuhl Informatik in der Architektur (InfAR) stattgefunden hat. Das Projekt wurde in Zusammenarbeit mit Psychologen, Kognitions- und Computerwissenschaftlern des DFG geförderten Fo...

Video of a floorplan syntesis systems described in the book.

The paper presents ongoing applied research on the development of a computational design tool addressing planning deficiencies in the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Because of increasing population pressure and a lack of planning resources, Addis Ababa is clearly in need of new efficient planning solutions. The tool proposed utilizes and combines d...

n this paper we describe a multi-faceted approach of introducing a user-centred perspective into the architectural design studio, drawing expertise from cognitive and environmental psychology, computational approaches in (generative) architectural design as well as space syntax. The one-semester design studio was combined with a theory seminar, exc...

Experiencing architecture is an experience of space. Designing architecture is the design of space. While space can be seen as the cardinal concept of architecture - it is used in entirely different ways in the two modes of architecture: reception and production. This dichotomy results in a serious problem: urban or interior spaces are conceived in...

Die im vorliegenden Buch dokumentierten Untersuchungen befassen sich mit der Entwicklung von Methoden zur algorithmischen Lösung von Layoutaufgaben im architektonischen Kontext. Layout bezeichnet hier die gestalterisch und funktional sinnvolle Anordnung räumlicher Elemente, z.B. von Parzellen, Gebäuden, Räumen auf bestimmten Maßstabsebenen. Die vor...

This paper focuses on computer-based generative methods for layout problems in architecture and urban planning with special regard for the hierarchical structuring of layout elements. The generation of layouts takes place using evolutionary algorithms, which are used to optimize the arrangement of elements in terms of overlapping within a given bou...

Parametric modeling is a powerful tool that allows designers to explore a wide range of variants of their design concept. However, when evaluating the spatial properties of such variants, the tools for parametric modeling offer little support. While on the other hand a wide range of methods exists for analyzing geometry in terms of its spatial prop...

The starting point of this study is the hypothesis that aesthetic judgements about two-dimensional layouts indirectly inform how functional aspects are evaluated. To test this assumption we investigated whether there is a connection between the topological property of the “intelligibility” of two-dimensional layouts and their aesthetic evaluation....