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.