Generative design of a nature-inspired geometry manipulated by an algorithm in a BIM-environment, applied in a façade system for a residential building in Bologna, Italy

In terms of technology, BIM is also part of the worldwide change Industry 4.0, which in essence is the trend toward automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies and processes. Generative design is an iterative process that involves a program that will generate a certain number of outputs that meet certain constraints, so that a designer is able to fine tune the feasible project by changing minimal and maximal values of an interval in which a variable of the program meets the set of constraints, in order to reduce or augment the number of outputs to choose from. The initial idea of this thesis work was to manipulate few of the most basic geometric elements in order to get a complex parametric shape inspired from the honeycomb as the natures perfectly generated the element. This preliminary idea, together with the ambition to use this transformation for a façade system in a structural building led us to a series of decisions to try and connect two “worlds”, in the sense that we have a CAD environment that lets us create the geometry and a BIM environment where everything is represented by a specific level of information. This geometry is given a specific set of rules that drive and manipulate each of the elements it contains in a certain fashion. This methodology, as well as the communication and the interaction between the software adopted and their programming environments, is what makes the generative design possible. This result from the Grasshopper algorithm is then being created in the CAD environment in Rhinoceros3D, which then can be opened through Rhino.Inside.Revit and give us a direct real-time preview in the BIM environment in Revit. Through a long series of testing and experimenting with the geometry, we get to a point where we have a functional algorithm that creates and manipulates the geometry, in order to foster many design opportunities for structural and architectural designers.