Connecting the Portuguese system of evolutive housing with building information modeling: From analogical to digital methods

In Portugal, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was research concerning a system of the architectural design of housing for economically less favored populations, which related sociological information with analogical computational methods and culminated with its application in the Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL). This article presents the digitization process of these methods for the development of an architectural design system for social housing. The main goal is to improve methodological procedures for the original research and, specifically, to adapt them to computational design and modeling processes. To this end, this research transposed the aforementioned methodology into an algorithmic model that matches sociological information acquired from an online form with a database of social housing floor plan images to generate a building information modeling (BIM) directly from the selected image source. The result is an algorithmic model informed by sociological data linked with a BIM model to enable further rationalization of architectural design.