ARCH-Elites: Quality-Diversity for Urban Design
This provides a new paradigm for architectural generative design, enabling real-time performance evaluation and exploration of design possibilities for urban planners and architects.
The paper tackles the problem of generating urban designs by introducing ARCH-Elites, a method that reconfigures large-scale urban layouts using a pre-trained surrogate model to avoid costly simulations, and demonstrates its application in generating novel designs for two real-world locations in Boston.
This paper introduces ARCH-Elites, a MAP-Elites implementation that can reconfigure large-scale urban layouts at real-world locations via a pre-trained surrogate model instead of costly simulations. In a series of experiments, we generate novel urban designs for two real-world locations in Boston, Massachusetts. Combining the exploration of a possibility space with real-time performance evaluation creates a powerful new paradigm for architectural generative design that can extract and articulate design intelligence.