Proceedings of the 2011 Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design

Our built environment is the site where our incremental understanding of the world and natural phenomenon leads to techniques of creation and modals of construction; a site where our creative capacity in utilizing our tools and techniques manifest itself into a world we inhabit. In an era driven by our ambition for environmental reform and green design, then we have to question the capacity of our existing methods in helping us to achieve deeper insight into the properties of complex systems such as our built environment. Using simulation methods to study complex processes and interactions is fairly well positioned in the history of technological innovation. However, at this moment of history, the unforeseen behavior of our built environment is grabbing more forcefully our attention. The role of simulation either as a predictive model, providing us a slice of reality, or as a prescriptive model, allowing us to tweak and explore alternative realities, is already widely explored in physics, biology, economics and engineering. Simulation is also a "game changer" in how we will fundamentally rationalize and conceptualize the design of our built environment. The future availability of massive data simulated through a sea of distributed processors combined with the data collected from an instrumented environment are only few exemplary paradigms that will challenge our conventional assumptions about the built environment in the near future.