Reconfiguring atrium hotels: Generating hybrid designs with visual computations in Shape Machine

This research aims to generate hotel designs using visual production systems in a computer-aided design environment. The current goal is to explore how visual-computational methods offer new approaches to space planning problems by implementing a ruleset based on existing atrium hotel precedents. The ruleset focuses on formalizing the logic of three atrium hotels to define Atr-Ino, an implementation for generating hotel designs. Atr-Ino is specified in a shape rewrite technology called Shape Machine to generate the original precedent designs, variations based on the three prototypes, and a series of reconfigured hybrid designs. In addition, a user study demonstrates how the rules of Atr-Ino can be used and/or redrafted to generate new hotel designs characterized by double-loaded configurations. •A case study on the generation of hotel designs with visual-computational methods.•An atria hotel grammar for design generation based on a corpus of three precedent designs.•An implementation in Shape Machine for space planning in architectural design.