Parametric design tool generates the optimal residential tower

• Same tower program fits 2 fewer floors
• Combines drawing + calculation in 1 step
• Visualized live on real site context

J.P. van Eesteren built its parametric design tool on VIKTOR to close the gap between architectural design and engineering calculation, which had always been two separate, back-and-forth steps. As Max de Vries, Project Developer at J.P. van Eesteren, explained: "Regularly, we come up with an idea from which the architect creates a design. Naturally, this is not immediately sufficient. So we start calculating again, and again, and go on. With our application, we can combine drawings and calculations, which means we can iterate much faster and cheaper!"

A key requirement was keeping engineers in control rather than handing decisions to a black box. De Vries put it this way: "We have specifically chosen that the person who is using the application is also the one that is really behind the steering wheel." The tool encodes the firm's written and unwritten design rules directly, so every generated tower design reflects real engineering and regulatory constraints, not just a rough concept.

Residential tower design at J.P. van Eesteren involved tracking a large number of requirements and rules, both formal building regulations and the firm's own internal, unwritten design standards. As De Vries put it: "These days, there are many requirements and rules that need to be tended to. What we need is a system to secure them."

Encoding those rules into a working tool was itself a challenge: "When we developed our tool, we started looking for ways to incorporate all of these rules, both written and unwritten. If we were not able to program them, we were not being sharp enough." The firm also had to avoid building a black-box tool, since architects and engineers needed to stay in control of, and understand, the reasoning behind each generated design.

Before the parametric design tool, designing a residential tower at J.P. van Eesteren meant a manual, iterative back-and-forth between the architect and the engineering team. An architect would sketch a design based on an initial idea, engineers would calculate whether it was structurally and programmatically feasible, and if it wasn't, the process started over.

As De Vries described it, "we start calculating again, and again, and go on," cycling between drawing and calculation until landing on a design that satisfied both the architectural vision and the underlying rules and regulations.

Building its own parametric design tool on VIKTOR let J.P. van Eesteren combine drawing and calculation into a single step instead of cycling between an architect and an engineering team. Martijn de Rog, BIM Director at J.P. van Eesteren, summarized the result: "Building our own parametric design tool enabled us to generate the most efficient design for the available space, and save a considerable amount of time while doing so."

On at least one real project, that efficiency translated into a concrete space saving. As de Rog explained: "We were able to re-calculate the design for a residential tower that could host the same [facilities], only with two floors less!" Finding a design that fits the same program into two fewer floors is a direct, quantifiable win on both construction cost and buildable density.

The tool also keeps engineers firmly in control of the outcome. Because it visualizes each design on a real map, using open data on surrounding buildings, architects and engineers can see immediately how a change to the tower's dimensions or layout plays out on the actual site, rather than working from an abstract model.