C.Soddu, E.Colabella
Artificial intelligence and Architectural Design
THE EMULATION OF DESIGN PROCEDURES
A tool that operates in the field of design processes needs to construct, with algorithms, a set of
logical procedures that are, in practice, the logical procedures of discovery. These procedures are
not analytical.
They are like the epistemological structure of scientific discovery.
To use information technologies in the architectural design we need to have a software able to
simulate the increasing complexity of the system in front of the progressive stratification of ever
different and not necessarily coherent approaches.
The software we have developed, Basilica, is an intelligent interface between the designer and the
project. It helps the architect using a controllable and changeable logical sequence of morphogenesis.
Following the selected approach, the tool can generate a set of different formalised scenarios in
response to the progressive multiplicity of questions.
Every generated scenario needs to be a different and clearly characterised one. This is because the
design procedure is a developing path. In order to simulate it, Basilica uses a nonlinear,
unpredictable, and increasingly complex sequence. Using this approach, Basilica can generate a
sequence of possible scenarios that can reply not only to the pre-coded questions, but also to the
unpredictable conceptual needs of the architect.
The algorithms of this software are not organised with a shaped data base, and do not refer to a
deductive request/reply structure. This is because in the design processes, every formalised reply
exceeds the field of pertinence of the request. The architects use the random margins between
requests and formalised replies to answer to their conceptual needs, to perform their idea of the
architecture. The role of these algorithms is to simulate the human procedure of design evolution, of
discovering the possible fields and, in the same moment, replying in advance to the unknown and
unpredictable answers with a set of possible virtual scenarios.
In other words Basilica simulates the logical design procedures shaped as a formalising engine that
changes every answer into possible choices using a formal matrix. During every cycle, the developing
project system gets to an increasingly complex level. As it normally happens during any design
process, the software changes what before was random into what after is necessary, because it has
just happened.
For this reason we assimilate this algorithmic procedures to the inferential procedures of AI. So we
can manage, evaluate and control the increasing complexity and adaptivity of the project, that is the
increasing of power to get out intersubjective replies through the explicit stratification of a sequence
of subjective contributions.
Last review 02 December 1995
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