Form-Finding Method of Site Road from the Perspective of Meta-Design

Abstract

Site road alignment is one of the main elements of architectural environmental design [B. Holdsworth, Refocus 6(1) (2005) 58–60]. It is difficult for traditional methods to achieve both qualitative exploration and quantitative optimization objectives, and optimization algorithms can only optimize quantitative objectives. On the other hand, the shape of the site road is subject to various other human interventions besides the designer, which is a multi-objective problem. Based on the idea of meta-design, this paper proposes a new method for “form-finding” of site roads. This method develops the architecture and components of an expert system, which can handle both qualitative and quantitative objectives in conceptual design, and can realize various human interventions. Component development combines site specification, recursive algorithm, and genetic algorithm, which treats human intervention as a factor of variation, allows for qualitative exploration of different preferences, and finally demonstrates the capabilities of this new approach through case studies.