A SANS-compliant office tower concept, regenerated in 30 minutes
Client and context
A leading South African architectural practice (name withheld) raised what it called
the boilerplate problem: fire stairs, lift banks, ablution cores, structural grids
and curtain walls are redrawn from scratch on every commercial project, even though
the same SANS 10400 clauses drive the same dimensions every time.
The problem
Concept-stage design burns senior time on components that barely change between
projects, and hand-built concept models drift out of regulatory compliance as they
are edited. The practice wanted to see whether compliant boilerplate could be
generated, not drawn.
The approach
FaolanIQ Loki built a parametric office tower generator as a proof of concept. Every
default in the model is clause-backed, not assumed: stair clear width 1 200 mm
against the SANS 10400-S minimum of 1 100 mm, riser-and-going geometry 2R+G = 630 mm
inside the 580-660 mm band, 13-person 1 000 kg lift shafts at 1 700 mm x 2 000 mm
per SANS 10400-M and SANS 1545, 200 mm reinforced concrete core walls for the
2-hour fire rating per SANS 10400-T, floor-to-floor and grid dimensions per
SANS 10400-B and -F office practice. The whole building regenerates from one
parameter file: the same definition produced a 6-storey tower on a 30 m x 24 m
plate and 9 m x 9 m grid, and a 22-storey tower on a 36 m x 28 m plate and
9 m x 12 m grid, in the same recorded session of about 30 minutes.
The outcome
The concept model is not a picture: it exported as an 8 MB STEP assembly that opens
in any CAD package, with a bill of materials extracted from the same geometry (the
22-storey variant carries a modelled slab concrete volume of 5 185 m3). Compliance
sits in the generator, so every regeneration is compliant by construction, and the
clause reference card ships with the model so a reviewer can trace every dimension
to its source.
What this demonstrates
The platform closes the gap between design intent and regulation: change the brief,
regenerate the building, keep the compliance. For repeat building types, concept
iteration becomes a parameter edit rather than a redraw.