An intelligent tool to assist architecture students in the early stages of design

Abstract

In this paper we present BH-ShaDe, an educational software tool that assists architecture students in the process of learning to design single-family dwellings. To this end, BH-ShaDe generates and proposes housing units schemes, which can serve as starting points in student´s exercises and projects. The tool has been designed and implemented based on the ideas of reinforcement learning and shape grammars. The students can select the more promising schemes (among those generated by the tool), and then transform them in complete architectural plans, and finally use them to develop a complete residential project. To evaluate the validity of this approach, BH-ShaDe has been tested with 78 architecture students of the University of Málaga. The results have shown that the starting points were suitable, diverse and useful, and that they have helped students to learn how to design residential projects.