Digital Tools for Sustainable Revitalization of Buildings - Finding new Utilizations through Destructive and Non-Destructive Floor Space Relocation

In 1845 Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem “The Raven”, an act full of poetry, love, passion, mourning, melancholia and death. In his essay “The Theory of Composition” which was published in 1846 Poe proved that the poem is based on an accurate mathematical description. Not only in literature are structures present that are based on mathematics. In the work of famous musicians, artists or architects like Bach, Escher or Palladio it is evident that the beauty and clarity of their work as well as its traceability has often been reached through the use of intrinsic mathematic coherences. If suchlike structures could be described within architecture, their mathematical abstraction could supplement “The Theory of Composition” of a building. This research focuses on an approach to describe layout principles of existing buildings in the form of mathematical rules. Provided that “design” is in principle a combinatorial problem, i.e. a constraint-based search for an overall optimal solution of a design problem, two exemplary methods will be described to apply new utilizations to existing buildings through the use of these rules