CGAN-Assisted Renovation of the Styles and Features of Street Facades—A Case Study of the Wuyi Area in Fujian, China

Abstract

With the development of society and the economy, the unified planning of architectural styles has become a significant problem in the balance between urban expansion and the protection of traditional buildings in villages and towns. This also allows people to re-examine the appearance of and quality of life, experienced by those in traditional village buildings. This research employs a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) to develop a generative technique for designing building facades in villages and cities. The provided results can be used to develop schemes and as design references for building facade design, enhancing the design efficiency of building facades. Simultaneously, we utilized this model for the rehabilitation of building facades in villages and towns, as well as in the visual design of rural tourism products, demonstrating its practical usefulness and design-related potential. We took villages and towns in the Wuyishan area of China as an example and carried out model training, image generation, and a comparison of the derivation results of different assumed buildings and product contours. The research shows that: (1) CGAN can be used to produce and supply reference schemes for conventional civil construction facade design in rural and urban areas. (2) In terms of adaptability, CGAN may develop architectural facade design schemes with a reference value for the hypothetical experimental building facades, and it can play a role in other design domains, as well. (3) The construction of this method is not only applicable to villages and towns in the World Heritage es Cities Programme, but can be further promoted and used in the future for cities and villages that have a demand for architectural style consistency.