Simulation of flow and view with applications in computational design of settlement layouts

We present methodology, algorithms and software for evaluating flow and view for architectural settlement layouts. For a given settlement layout consisting of a number of buildings arbitrarly positioned on a piece of land, in the present study an island situated on the west coast of Sweden, the methodology allows for evaluation of flow patterns and for evaluating the view experienced from the buildings. The computation of flow is based on a multimesh finite element methods, which allows each building to be embedded in a boundary-fitted mesh which can be moved around freely in a fixed background mesh. The computation of view is based on a novel and objective measure of the view which can be efficiently computed by rasterization.