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.