Program distribution and variations

Grasshopper
1

Hello lovely people,

I have an architectural program, i.e. a set of functions with assigned areas in square meters, and a “form” (barely) that’s made up of a few floors divided in irregular polygonal areas (triangles and quads). I’d like to use grasshopper to generate a bunch of possible distributions of the program into the form.

I know, I know, floor plan generation is an extremely complex field of research and people much smarter than me have tried and failed to replicate what entire teams of even smarter people have spent their entire careers trying to achieve, and the job of an architect will never fully be replaced by an algorithm. I totally understand and respect that.

Here’s the thing though: my intent with this is NOT to have the computer magically come up with “the best” possible layout. I simply want to generate a bunch (a few dozen?) of options that satisfy very basic criteria i.e. all program elements are put in and, ideally, clustered together according to their “category” if that makes sense.

I started by looking at Galapagos but unless I’m mistaken it’s clearly not the tool for the job as this is really not an optimization problem. I also looked at Octopus, Wallacei and Design Space Exploration for the “generating options” aspect of my problem but again seeing as there’s really no objective beyond just generating options that satisfy the basic conditions I feel like that’s not the right way to go about this.

I then looked at a bunch of floor plan/massing/program distribution examples and papers, but I haven’t been able to find any that attempt to fit a certain program into preexisting geometry in quite the way that I’m intending.

So right now I’m in the frustrating position of feeling like there likely is a way to do what I want in a way that’s probably much more straightforward than what I’ve been considering so far yet simultaneously being completely unable to come up even with the basic pseudo-code logic for what I’m trying to do.

Does anyone have any idea how I could go about this? I’m not asking for anyone to do the work for me, I only need some suggestions to point me in a viable direction.

Thank you all!

Attached is the form in question.

Exploration 35.gh (70.5 KB)

2

Here’s a screencap if anyone wants to weigh in without dowloading and opening the definition.

My definition contains two approaches to get to more or less equivalent results, one using meshes and the other breps.

In order to start distributing the program I figure I need to combine some “cells” together to get the right area for each program element. I feel like to do that it’s necessary to determine adjacencies between cells. I’m unable to get the brep topology component to work for that (possibly because the breps here are planar?) so I looked into the sandbox topology tools and it seems to work with my mesh approach but only when I plug in the meshes one by one (story by story).

And then I’m stuck.

ScreenCap_3
ScreenCap_31250×799 137 KB