The high school I went to was supposedly built without interior walls originally, as some kind of experiment… I guess they were just going to gather all the classrooms in little clumps like planets in a solar system, distantly visible from each other, and then the teachers would… I don’t know, talk really quietly? Or maybe that was just a rumor to explain why the building’s air conditioning system was so horrible.
2 Likes
Okay, I will take the bait:
Update: Some people dismiss Zoolander as stupid and pathetic (the movie, not the character). Me, I only dismiss Derek Zoolander the character as stupid and pathetic. The movie is great!
6 Likes
And some logical HVAC, plumbing and electric infrastructure layout.
2 Likes
I’m sure I’ve seen this school somewhere before…
1 Like
My elementary school was built at the beginning of the 70s, with the ‘cluster’ plan. There were 4 clusters, with 4 classrooms each that opened onto a common area with a domed roof and skylight; a 5th area was designated for lockers and coats. You could walk through the locker area either into the commons, or out into the rest of the building. A central library connected all the clusters, with one end of the building for offices and rooms that really needed doors, like the music room, gym, and kindergarten.
The noise level in individual classes was somewhat elevated because you could hear the neighboring classes, and some kids couldn’t adjust to the distraction. AFAIK, the roof didn’t leak, however.
5 Likes
In a way this feels like a new iteration of brutalism or modernism, where the architectural utility of the building is tantamount to all other concerns, up to and including its practicality and the emotional well-being of its occupants. This algorithm also seems to be kind of dumbly concerned with path optimization and ensuring that spaces retain the same amount of floor space as their traditional counterparts, without taking into account the actual function of each room. Classrooms would probably work fine as more organic shapes, but gyms and stages not so much. An algorithm capable of creating actually-functional spaces would need to be able to do more than just ant-march some hallways through a bunch of Voronoi cells.
I still think this sort of thing is neat, though. Outside of more esoteric places like libraries and museums, we don’t have a lot of experience with living or working in organically-shaped interior spaces. If you could tackle concerns like acoustics, access to natural light, and basic things like hallway width, it would be interesting to see how people take to things that look more like a buckyball or a yurt than a box. Were it not for the potential to ruin a whole generation of kids because they went to school in a disaster of architecture, schools seem like one of the better places to experiment with this sort of idea because they’re not as constrained by the “all furniture needs to fit against a flat wall” requirement as most people’s houses are.
10 Likes
Obviously designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson
4 Likes
The high school i went to used a building floor plan that was highly functional but plain. Was two stories with a central courtyard type space. no tables or anything in the space. The space was inside the building so it wasn’t open air but it looked like a prison. I remember my high school years fondly but yeah… was not crazy about the building itself.
3 Likes
“Yes I need 2 loads of 2x4x8 with a 32 degree bend, plus some 15’s oh and can you cut carpet into custom shapes?”
3 Likes
Can we feed Strava’s path data for Burning Man into this, and come up with an experimental layout? That said it would probably try to put the man right in the middle of the city, which would make the burn a bit more interesting.
2 Likes
Remember what coach taught us: There is no “I” in “Floorplans.”
4 Likes
And noting that it is in Maine, the skylights would be covered with snow almost 1/2 the year. Just a couple years ago an HVAC tech fell through a skylight in a commercial building down the road, there was so much snow* he had no idea it was there.
*Clearly there are other ways he could have learned the layout and saved himself, just pointing out that they’re covered pretty good in the winter.
He lived.
2 Likes
The images remind me of a pre-industrial village site map. The one on the left particularly resembles a Pueblo to me.
Also, humans have plenty of experience living in non-box spaces!!! Caves, Tepees, igloos, my aunt’s geodesic dome, etc.
Sure curvilinear forms are more difficult to standardize around, so they aren’t as efficient to mass produce for, but that’s a concern to profit. I tend to think 3-d printing will eventually erase that gap, anyway, and in general design trends will skew towards custom solutions and away from mass production. Here’s to hoping anyways.
All that said, I don’t have high hopes for AI-generated design, at least in the near-term, mostly for the same problems AI has in other areas. Architecture is intimately experiential, which isn’t something that can easily be evaluated in an algorithm. But as I noted, this program didn’t produce any sort of breakthrough. We’ve practiced this sort of pathfinding for a quite a long time.
4 Likes
And then let the computer design people optimised to fit the furniture!
7 Likes
I’d like to see these rendered for a virtual walk-through.
1 Like
Growing up in my neighborhood’s school playground there was a curved concrete building. Not sure what to call the kind or style of building it is but i remember it fondly, it was awesome as hell… on the downlow us kids would crawl on top of the roof when adults weren’t watching. Not that you heard that from me
*Not my picture. Just one i found online, pretty neat 
10 Likes
This is not a bug, it’s a feature!
1 Like
At least the it sort of looks like a lung.
3 Likes
It looks so organic, it should be pulsing.
“Heeeello! In today’s matchup, the Zerg player in blue is off to an early start, dropping a hatchery, followed by an elementary school!”
4 Likes
I’m guessing that it means “actually HAS fire exits.” because most of the corridors in the one on the left are dead-ends. If there a fire starts in the electrical closet (because that could never happen) everybody dies, because it blocks the only exits.
Edited to add: The “optimized for minimizing escape paths,” plan still has dead end corridors that are too long to satisfy typical fire codes. To the maximum degree possible, once you are in a corridor you always want two different paths to an exit. to minimize the chance that there is a fire between you and the exit.
3 Likes
