Keywords: form finding, integrated design, architectural design, parametric design.

Building design on one hand requires significant thought about structural, functional and cost-demands, while on the other hand it sometimes also has to fulfil the aesthetic demands from the architect or designer. Building design can be viewed as an integrated process between engineers and architects where the engineers and architects have various digital analysis tools and design tools, respectively. With these relatively new digital tools, new possibilities have appeared in both engineering and architecture: both in virtual reality and in the build reality. Development today in computer aided design programmes goes towards undertaking the design, modelling and analysis inside the so-called building information modelling (BIM) tools. A drawback of those tools is that they follow a bottom-up approach for the configuration of the structural system with limited room for higher level concepts such as structural subsystems and assemblies. In addition, such tools do not consider the interdependency between functional spaces and the structural system and do not provide capabilities for inspecting the architectural model from a structural standpoint. To go from one result to the next, to do a design iteration, the architect or designer will have to go all the way back to the formulation of the problem, and change the basic parameters of the problem.

To deal properly with the conceptual design of building structures, tools should allow structural engineers to synthesize structural schemes earlier within a building architectural context as well as approximate analysis and evaluation of conceptual design alternatives. It is proposed that an approach to conceptual structural design should be based on a hierarchical top-down synthesis paradigm for laying out the structural system due to the intrinsic interdependency between the building architecture and the structural system which allows a two-way interaction between architects and structural engineers during the early design. Thus, through the recognition of a hierarchy during the design, the proposed approach ensures that engineers focus first on the overall structural implications of architectural schemes instead of premature consideration of details. A top-down approach to conceptual structural design corresponds to the natural flow of design thoughts and ideas while conceiving structural schemes. It allows overall schemes to become contexts for thinking about local issues of detail component interactions, and ensures compatibility between overall schemes and their constituent components.

The tools mentioned above have primarily been developed simply by and for engineers. The designer or architect tends to be neglected in this respect and to be forced to rely unduly on the know-how of the engineer. The design process becomes divided up into a designer or architect part and an engineering part instead of a collaborative process being established. The conceptual design for an architect can be very abstract, with content that might be more poetic than geometric. On the other hand the conceptual design for a structural engineer tends to be more concrete in nature, i.e. the choice between an arch and a suspension structure, between concrete or steel. A digital design tool for conceptual design should provide the possibility for the architect to work with both the aesthetic as well as the technical aspects of architecture without jumping from aesthetics to technical and back, but to work with both simultaneously and in real time.

The aim of the present paper is to address the problem of a vague or non existent link between digital conceptual design tools used by architects and designers. The paper presents a first proposal for a conceptual design tool based on a parametric approach using generative components with real time engineering analysis which can be used in the early conceptual design phase. An example with a static determinate roof structure modelled by beam components is given. The example outlines the idea of the tool for conceptual design in early phase of a multidisciplinary design process between architecture and structural engineering.

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