Visual analytics for sustainable sports hall design

Abstract

Sustainability in sports also concerns the sport infrastructure. In order to meet the European Union’s directive to build nearly Zero Energy Buildings in 2020, this graduation research is about the performance-driven design process of a nearly Zero-Energy sports hall in Overhoeks, Amsterdam. Computational design systems proposed by most existing researches in architecture do not enable interconnected analysis of quantitative and qualitative design performances. This research proposes a visual analytics system that visualizes design geometries and performances of a large data set of manually or procedurally generated design alternatives in a highly interactive data environment. This research developed a prototype of the visual analytics system to visualize a data set of sports hall design alternatives. The design process of the sports hall is driven by data analysis using the visual analytics tool, which visualizes a data set generated by a computational design system that procedurally generates a large set of design alternatives and analyses energy performances, visual comfort performances and thermal comfort performances of each alternative. The visualisation of the design geometries makes it possible that the building is designed in such a way that the building is architecturally attractive, emphasizes the importance of sports and is sustainable. Peer review and user experience determined whether the tool as a whole and whether its data analytics methods suit the design making process of practitioners in the field of architecture.