Empowering building design professionals through Artificial Intelligence on the cloud

Project Information

ARCHITECHTURES

Grant agreement ID: 854888

DOI

10.3030/854888

Project closed

EC signature date 8 February 2019

Start date 1 March 2019

End date 31 July 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

SMARTSCAPES STUDIO SL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ARCHITECHTURES (Empowering building design professionals through Artificial Intelligence on the cloud)

Reporting period: 2019-03-01 to 2019-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Currently, the global population is growing by more than 1,5M people each week and urban areas will host more than 3,500 M people by 2050, producing a huge growing demand for housing. As population grows, overall pressure on natural resources and the environment is also increasing. The housing sector uses 40% of the planet's total resources and represents more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, architecture is a high labour-intensive process: more than 1000 person-hours of design development are needed for a regular residential project. The pressure is on for building contractors, developers and design teams to find ways of designing efficient buildings at a faster pace at lower costs whilst maintaining or even increasing the building quality levels.

In this conductive context, ARCHITEChTURES aims to launch into the market the first cloud-based platform for sustainable architecture design, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our end goal is to make environmentally responsible housing widely affordable whilst drastically increasing architects’ productivity: creating faster and better building designs.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ARCHITECTURES is the cornerstone of Smartscapes’ strategic plan to catapult and position our enterprise as a leading innovator in the digital architecture era. Phase 1 of the SME Instrument has led us to assess, review and validate our business model. When undergoing this validation process, we have concretised the technical specifications, defined a planned system development roadmap and contrasted our proposed offering with our stakeholders to see the feasibility of our project. The conclusions of the business plan have confirmed that:
√ The business idea is solid
√ The market is ready to adopt our solution and has unmet demands.
√ There are not competitive offerings in the market with similar technical offering and commercial approach as ours.
√ Our firm has the technical/business capacity to scale up the project: Previous experiences in the market, diverse team capabilities, solid partnership agreements.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ARCHITEChTURES is a high-potential innovation that aims to disrupt the high-volume industry of architecture, construction and engineering. Our advanced software empowers building design teams to bet on green housing designs leveraging digitisation, information modelling and disruptive AI technologies. As a result, it drastically improves profitability (time and cost reduction), while delivering higher quality building layouts (AI applied to architectural design and higher environmental performance).
Customer pain points and progress beyond the state of the art include:
- Time efficiency, shortening >40% the project development lifespan enabling faster urban construction.
- Labour efficiency, freeing up resources (architects’ time) from repetitive and low value tasks, to high value ones such as value-added design decisions, personalisation, creative solutions….
- Boosting green housing: making projects affordable, compliant with certifications and not requiring a great deal of specialised knowledge (not always available, especially in emerging countries).
- Improving project management: budgetary simulations, viability studies and reports are automatically generated at an early stage and alongside every design iteration.

Picture design

ARCHITEChTURES CORE TEAM