Identification of sustainable designs for floating settlements using computational design techniques

This paper focuses on the conceptual design and the development of a floating neighborhood by taking advantage of computational methods. An application to a concept design of a floating neighborhood in the region of Urla — a coastal town close to İzmir in Turkey, has been studied. The scenario that has been addressed concerns the development of an efficient floating settlement between four islands that are local to the study region. The whole study revolves around two issues, first one is about configuration of the functions (accommodation, marine, yacht club, public area) in order to maximize accessibility, wind protection and visibility subject to both technical and nontechnical constraints. Second issue is to find a suitable form, generated by shortest walk algorithm that decides how to create roads between functions where their places are gathered from optimization solutions. For the configuration of the functions, since wind protection and visibility objectives, as well as accessibility and visibility are conflicting with each other, we make use of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. The NSGA-II and DE algorithms are implemented in a Parametric Design Environment that is familiar in the architectural practice. We demonstrate that the NSGA-II performs slightly better in terms of hyper volume calculation, and achieves promising results when the Pareto front approximation is examined.