Machine Learning Assisted Urban Filling

When drawing urban scale plans, designers should always define the position and the shape of each building. This process usually costs much time in the early design stage when the condition of a city has not been finally determined. Thus the designers spend a lot of time working forward and backward drawing sketches for different characteristics of cities. Meanwhile, machine learning, as a decision-making tool, has been widely used in many fields. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a model frame in machine learning, specially designed to learn and generate image data. Therefore, this research aims to apply GAN in creating urban design plans, helping designers automatically generate the predicted details of buildings configuration with a given condition of cities. Through the machine learning of image pairs, the result shows the relationship between the site conditions (roads, green lands, and rivers) and the configuration of buildings. This automatic design tool can help release the heavy load of urban designers in the early design stage, quickly providing a preview of design solutions for urban design tasks. The analysis of different machine learning models trained by the data from different cities inspires urban designers with design strategies and features in distinct conditions. © 2020 and published by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.