-stacking building shapes of your city @pveloso13

The question underlying this project is: what type of building shapes compose your city? How can we measure it?

Firstly, the project stores thousands of building shapes from OpenStreetMap. Then, it uses algorithms to evaluate the shape of the buildings according orthogonality, dispersion, angular variation, edge variation, etc. With this analysis it normalizes all building shapes (so they end up with the same area) and creates a ranking. The examples below use dispersion criteria, so the ranking starts in the bottom left with the most compact buildings (usually, circular or regular polygons), then it fill each row with buildings less and less compact. The final layout was largely influenced by the clustering presentation of les villes rangees, so that the original map is presented side by side with the stacked shapes.

The interesting aspect of the project is that it work in different scales. From a certain distance the stack form a general pattern in which different cities can be analysed. For instance, note how Brasilia’s stack looks like a very ordered sequence of horizontal lines composed by rectangular buildings. These lines are occasionally interrupted by unexpected strange buildings. In opposition, European cities have a variety of building types in public and private sphere, so the ranking is much more diverse.

Besides, if you zoom in you’ll see that all the buildings are decontextualized (not connected to urban tissue and with the same size as all the others). So you can look at them as living beings on their owns, with a specific geometry (or maybe with the same geometry of dozens neighbours). In the case of Brasilia, the “outlaw” buildings are lost in the middle of the rectangular neighbours.

I’ll use this project as the base for the final project, incorporating interaction, shape comparison and other features.

[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/brasilia1.pdf”]
[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/brasilia2.pdf”]

[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/siena1.pdf”]
[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/siena2.pdf”]

[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/paris1.pdf”]
[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/paris2.pdf”]

[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/london1.pdf”]
[gview file=”https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/london2.pdf”]