FIELD NOTE / Automation in construction
Automating construction without losing the brief
Automation is most useful when the people affected by a building can see their priorities represented in the rules.
“much of the relationship between design attributes and values are tacit knowledge”
Sahadevan et al., ISARC 2023
Change the brief. Change the answer.
A connected learning campus on a sloping, irregular site. Compare a learning street, an enclosed courtyard and garden-facing commons. Each brings teaching rooms, a library, maker spaces and dining together around shared circulation.
Tap a space to inspect its use and area.
WHAT DOES THE BRIEF PRIORITISE?
Programme, landscape & scoring
This illustrative generator explores how a brief changes the preferred solution; it is not an implementation of VALGEN. Every option is one connected building. Teaching rooms face outer walls or a courtyard. Libraries, maker rooms, dining and support spaces occupy deeper shared wings. Room doors connect to circulation; stairs and a lift allowance align between floors. Extra teaching bays become project studios, preserving the requested classroom count. The floor selector shows one level at a time.
The synthetic site has an irregular boundary, one-metre terrain contours, retained woodland, a rain garden and two pedestrian entrances. A one-metre, eight-direction route search avoids these obstacles and penalises slope by distance × (1 + 90 × grade²). Corners are rounded on clear ground. The reported grade is measured, not an accessibility guarantee. Moving the building changes routes and the volume between its level floor datum and the existing terrain.
Facade access is the exterior perimeter / footprint divided by 0.26, capped at 1. Shorter walks score 1 − arrival route / 100 m. Open ground is the unbuilt site fraction. Less earthmoving scores 1 − the cut-plus-fill proxy / 4,000 m³. Scores are capped at 0–1 and slider weights are normalised. Earthwork is an approximate sampled volume, without foundations, soil bulking or retaining structures. These are transparent comparison measures, not daylight, ecological or engineering assessments. Building footprints that intersect protected landscape or exceed the boundary are excluded. Detailed structure, escape routes and regulatory compliance require subsequent design.
Generate, then explain
Construction automation can produce more design alternatives than a team could draw manually. That alone does not mean the alternatives are worth building. A useful system connects geometry and performance to the values behind the brief: access, comfort, flexibility, safety, operational efficiency and environmental impact.
The Automated Layout Zoning study examined a campus design problem where early planning choices shape later social and environmental value. Our 2026 VALGEN paper extends this direction by generating layout options, calculating design performance indicators and translating those measures into stakeholder value scores. The work asks a practical question: whose preferences is the system optimizing, and can we see the connection?
For me, the productive role of automation is to widen the search while making the judgment process more legible. Designers and stakeholders should inspect assumptions, compare alternatives and correct the system before a convenient metric becomes a bad decision.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Short paper excerpts above are attributed to their authors. Commentary is Kane Borg’s interpretation.