Matchmaker: an Instrument for Matching Demand for and Supply of Buildings and Revealing Specific Discrepancies

Field: Engineering (Physical Sciences)

<p>To match supply and demand of buildings, various approaches are possible. While artificial intelligenceis favoured by some, we think that a less 'heavy' approach can be more cost and time efficient. The case we have chosen to exemplify our approach concerns architectural heritage. To match supply and demandwhile at the same time respecting the constraints imposed by cultural heritage, it is necessary to bringthem together and to effectuate feasibility studies in the shortest possible time. The feasibility study shouldbe served by tools allowing the various partners to communicate on the level of the match between them, translated in terms of spatial organisation and building constraints. In the past years, our designmorphology group has developed and tested a graphic-based reordering tool which has been applied to large governmental buildings, both existing and new. The same tool can be used for weighted objectives ranking and evaluation, to have a synthetic view of the combined basic preferences and differences of the involved parties as for example in a jury wise evaluation and ranking of alternative proposals. The proposed tool is the electronic and graphic version of the data and association matrices, which have been for a long time recommended for use in the preliminary phases of design. But as long as these instruments could only be drawn and redrawn on paper they were much too ineffectual and found little real application. The developed tool is connected by sub-routines to a computer aided design package, within which the spatial patterns are translated into plans and attached data bases. The matching takes place in a number of steps. The first is to describe the organisation (the demanding party) as functional units which can be made corresponding with spatial units. The prescription of spatial needs can take place in both quantitative and qualitative manners. The Matchmaker tools offer the possibility of interactive clustering of spatial needs. Another step, which can be taken concurrently, is to describe the monument in spatial units and distance relationships. The input can be generated directly within the matrix, but it is much easier, more self evident and realistic to generate this automatically from the draughted plan. The following step is the input of constraints originating from heritage preservation objectives, expressed in levels of authorised intervention. Again, the Matchmaker tools offer here the possibility of visual clustering of spatial units, their relationships and associated properties. In the next step, the matching takes place. In this step the actual positions, properties and constraints of existing spaces in the monument are compared (and visualised by discrepancies views) to the optimised and clustered spatial needs of the end user. In the following phase, the feasibility in terms of space, building fabric and costs can be appraised. Once a compromise has been attained, preliminary proposals can be designed and laid down in terms of drawings. The spatialdesigns can then again be translated into matrix views and evaluated.</p>