TestFit Steps Into AI-Powered Building Design Automation
The company says the product can generate thousands of viable building designs in seconds.
A next step for artificial intelligence in commercial real estate is the automatic generation of “thousands of viable building designs in seconds.” TestFit, which provides software tools to automate lower levels of architectural design, has a new product called Generative Design.
It allows developers and architects create many optimized building designs in a brief amount of time, versus “the weeks and months just one design can take using traditional manual tools,” they said in an email to GlobeSt.com. A short video of the tool in action shows the process of setting parameters — the equivalent of creating a prompt for a generative AI — and then browsing through the resulting designs and then sorting through them by parameter values.
The designs aren’t finished but they do show various ways that space could be generally laid out for a certain type of building, like multifamily with an overall unit masterplan and number of units, including filters for floor area ratio, parking ratio, and yield on cost. It’s a set of initial steps that create prototypes, although not finished designs.
“Real estate development is innately bespoke,” Clifton Harness, chief executive officer and co-founder of TestFit, said in prepared remarks. “Every piece of land is unique, requiring every building to be a prototype. While experience and local knowledge can be applied to decision-making, with Generative Design, a machine can test every possible configuration, inclusive of what we would never even think to try.”
They claim that most generative design software addresses smaller-scale production. “TestFit Generative Design is different and works for sites of all scales from multi-family development to industrial buildings,” they wrote.
“We’re providing users with the ability to explore a multitude of design possibilities in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional methods,” Laura Paciano, TestFit senior vice president of growth said in prepared remarks. “In an era of land scarcity and escalating housing demand, Generative Design promises better and more efficient use for every site.”
“For generative design to truly be useful for architects, we have to admit that the fanciest UI, the best scripts, and the most complex parametric options won’t make architects want to learn to code,” the company wrote. The general idea of generative AI working off some form of prompt, rather than writing a scripting language.