4(13) 2010

Article	THE FINGERPRINT OF ARCHITECTURE: SKETCH-BASED DESIGN METHODS FOR RESEARCHING BUILDING LAYOUTS THROUGH THE SEMANTIC FINGERPRINTING OF FLOOR PLANS
Authors	C. Langenhan, Faculty of Architecture, TU München, Germany F. Petzold, Faculty of Architecture, TU München, Germany
Abstract	The paper focuses on the early stages of the design process where the architect needs assistance in finding reference projects and describes different aspects of a concept for retrieving previous design solutions with similar structural characteristics. A semantic fingerprint is proposed that contains a clear spatial description of an architectural dataset that is independent of its source format. The proposed system offers a computational approach to extracting a few characteristic and prominent features of a floor plan which are then used to generate a semantic fingerprint. The fingerprint inherits spatial-topological as well as semantic information and serves as a signature with which to identify projects with similar characteristics to the architect’s own explorations during the design process. The architectural design process can be described as a sketch-based process of analyzing and creation. In the paper, we examine the development of IT-technologies to provide a sketch-based submission and retrieval system for publishing and researching building layouts including their manipulation and subsequent use.
Keywords:	new media, case-based reasoning, taxonomy
	Article
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