An Exploration of Architectural Design Factors with a Consideration of Natural Aspects Based on Web Crawling and Text Mining

Abstract

Architectural construction is responsible for the consumption of large amounts of resources, so the optimization of architectural design and evaluation is significant for sustainable global development. Most architectural assessments focus on energy conservation, novel materials and eco-friendly strategies, but without agreed indicators and criteria. Since the consideration of natural aspects is somewhat fuzzy and vague, this study utilized data mining technology to explore the major factors related to relationships between buildings and nature. By employing the popular technique of web crawling, this study collected 38,320 architectural descriptions from the “Archdaily”, including descriptions of 11 types of buildings, four of which were taken as typical research representatives. The 100 most frequent words were used to create a word cloud. Using Python script, all of the text was refined and processed with the word2vec model, thereby allowing to conduct Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC). The frequency of words related to natural aspects were analyzed within 15 architectural design elements. Different building types in different areas have obvious similarities in terms of design elements, so it is feasible to adopt the same evaluation factors for the building evaluation systems of different regions. This paper mainly focuses on improving the accuracy and validity of assessment by providing basic evaluation indicators that could enhance connections between design and evaluation progress, stimulating the improvement of building environmental performance.