Flexible high-rise apartments with sparse wall-frame structure: A data-driven computational approach

Flexible housing resolves the fundamental conflicts between the long-standing structure and the evolving demands. We propose a computational method of optimizing the structural layout of high-rise residential buildings. Chinese high-rise apartment buildings have widely employed shear wall-frame structure in which one big room or multiple small rooms could occupy the same span. Fitting multiple floor plans into a fixed sparse scheme of shear walls and columns is feasible. We developed a computational framework to seek flexible structural schemes. A building scheme consists of a circulation core, shear walls, columns, and boundaries. The computer program automatically adapts floor plans to any drawn or generated scheme. Based on a large dataset of apartment layouts, the number of apartments that fit into a building scheme statistically reflects the flexibility of the scheme. If many hypothetical plans can fit into a wallframe structure in computer simulation, this structure could probably support several generations of unknown plans. Such a data-driven computational method provides the possibility of creating a one-to-many mapping between permanent structure and evolving apartment plans. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).