Vincent Tourre

Concurrent Geometric, Structural and Environmental Design: Louvre Abu Dhabi

Sophisticated contemporary design projects are constrained by the multi-objective requirements of architects, engineers, and specialty consultants. The Louvre Abu Dhabi represents a step forward in the concurrent engineering of multi-objective geometry conditions for environmentally informed envelope design. The project takes advantage of associative and generative modeling technology to create a framework for multi-constraint problems in which all stakeholders can embed their own requirements and design rules in a real-time and collaborative way. At the same time, the creation of a globally shared, web-hosted, versioned model provides a dramatically more open and transparent way for designers and engineers to converge toward a shared solution for the geometric and environmental challenges. Thus the Louvre Abu Dhabi provides a case study for a new concurrent design approach to multi-constraint geometric problems in architecture.

A general strategy for semantic levels of detail visualization in urban environment

Applications based on urban environments are applied frequently in daily life which increases the needs for a high quality visualization result. It combines the urban environment and the special application-related topic together. The urban environment can be visualized with different scales, namely with different levels of detail to improve rendering and processing performance of the application. Visualization for the special topic, semantics, similarly is in need of a smart strategy to stay consistent with information density. This paper proposes a general strategy to handle semantic levels of detail visualization in urban environment. An example is given to illustrate how it is applied. Later, a mapping between urban environment levels of detail and semantic levels of detail is discussed. In the last part, the limitations of the general strategy are stated. And visualization issues for semantics are listed such as the proper visualization form and technique for a given semantic level of detail. This paper aims to bring about a wider discussion on semantic levels of detail visualization in urban environment.

Applying level-of-detail and perceptive effects to 3D urban semantics visualization

Urban environment consists of various types of data, both geometric ones and non-geometric ones, among which urban semantics are important sources for non-geometric data. The modelling and visualization of urban semantics is one type of information visualization (InfoVis). In both 2D and 3D environment, a lot of work has been done, which use different kinds of representation forms to illustrate knowledge and information stored in the original abstract dataset. This paper aims to apply the idea of information level-of-detail (LoD) to urban semantics visualization and a text-based semantic database is built to illustrate how the idea works. Then in the implementation process, four perceptive factors for text visualization are chosen, while we mainly test, compare and analyse text size, aiming to better aid users find new knowledge and make decisions.

Motion Perspectives Integration in the Qualification of the Urban Spaces: Towards a 2D- and a 3D-Enrichment of the S-Partition Method

The spatio-cognitive properties of urban surroundings must be taken into account in the design of urban spaces. However there are few methods and software tools to assess the visual properties and the spatial identity of places, and most of them are based on two-dimensional visibility analysis only and on a static analysis of surroundings. Our proposal aims to provide turnkey solutions that could increase the implementation of urban planning policies concerned with sensitive impacts of urban fabric renewal. The method presented in this chapter enhances the urban space partition proposed by Peponis et al. (1997) in order to qualify all pedestrian paths in the studied area taking into account the importance of changes in visual surroundings and the vertical landmarks. In our use case, the results of our method applied on two paths are compared with a 3D isovists analysis in order to clearly show the keypoints in the path. A software solution has been developed as a plugin of the well-known SketchUp computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) tool to be tested by students in the context of project teaching in School of Architecture.