Wind-Based Parametric Design in the Changing Climate

Abstract

In the climate change era, the tendency to utilize computer-aided strategies in architectural design enables the incorporation of the influences of ambient conditions into the design process. Such a design strategy can consequently contribute to creating nature-based, sustainable architectural, and urban solutions. In this paper, it will be shown that the built environment can be designed, already from the first concepts, to affect and consequentially improve the local wind microclimate by addressing the unfavorable wind effects and proposing solutions for transforming them into an advantage. Utilizing the iterative Research Through Design (RTD) approach, the proposed data-driven wind-oriented shape optimization is introduced in a case study located in Stockholm. Three complex architectural shapes, resulting from the wind-oriented design approach, are parametrically designed in Grasshopper for Rhino and subsequently analyzed in a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) plug-in Swift for Grasshopper.

Keywords

• changing climate
• Research Through Design
• computer-aided
• parametric Computational Fluid Dynamics