Self-employed since October last year, Michael has been working very closely with Simlab, who were commissioned to design and develop a generative design tool, to assist in the proposals for an urban park for the Europan 8 competition, an urban design and housing competition open to all registered European architects under the age of 40.

 

The site in question was in Stonebridge (London UK), where the brief was for speculative housing surrounding a new public park. Simlab provided Michael with the facilities and assistance to firstly construct an experimental generative design tool, followed by actually incorporating the software’s generated designs into the urban park competition entry.

 

“I came to Simlab to contribute to a programming effort I started doing myself,” Michael says. “My continuing aim is to test a prototype design service that designs and procures experimental generative design software including parametric design and agent modelling. I deliberately looked to Simlab to very much test whether this was possible.”

 

“Initially there were no well-defined goals in the competition brief, but the results have been very impressive. We don’t just do visualisations, which is an obvious service, CGI and so on, but also we’re working on CAD customisations and building macros, so that the actual design can be generated purely and entirely from the computer.”

 

The software agent developed for the Stonebridge competition is capable of generating emergent routes and paths in open spaces, such as that of a park, by having the user simply specifying ‘target points’ of interest, as well as automating a contoured landscape around these paths, to construct a unique architectural array of designs that would have been virtually impossible to envision without the tool’s implementation.

 

“The service we aim to create is tangental to what Simlab normally provides, although it is very much in line with what UEL is teaching in the MSC Computing and Design course. This is the beginning of a long-term project that will continue to grow and evolve.”