Rectangular floorplans with block symmetry

Abstract

The principle of symmetry has beneficial applications in architecture. Symmetry mainly creates order and equilibrium in complex designs. This study presents a graph theoretic approach for the automatic generation of rectangular floorplans with block symmetry. Existing graph theoretical approaches focus on the floorplan’s outer boundary design, different room shapes, and spatial arrangements. This paper introduces block symmetry as a new concept in floorplan generation. Based on this concept, an algorithm is proposed for generating a rectangular floorplan with rectangular blocks for a given adjacency graph if one exists. Further, suppose two blocks are required to be symmetric, i.e., of equal size. In that case, an optimisation framework is used to equate the widths and heights of the blocks, resulting in the generation of a rectangular floorplan with block symmetry. A GUI is provided for users to perform the automatic generation of floorplans.