Digital Design for High-Performance Building Systems

The construction and operation of the built environment contributes significantly to global climate change; around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions come from this sector. In response, it is critical that architects, engineers, and builders rethink design and materialization processes that result in wasteful and inefficient constructions. At the same time, tools and processes used for automated design and optimization in other industries are challenging to apply to the design of buildings, because so many of the criteria for success in this area are qualitative and intrinsically human. In many cases, the shapes and geometries of building designs are critical to both performance- and human-driven design criteria i.e. how a design functions and how it looks. In this talk, Professor Mueller will share recent research that aims to bridge this divide, between performance-driven optimization methods and human design intuition and ingenuity, utilizing recent advances in computation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. She will also discuss new opportunities for the construction of efficient buildings, empowered by digital fabrication technologies.