KPF leveraged computational analysis to de-risk a complex district plan in Silicon Valley, rapidly generating optimal massing, parking, and building layouts.
The Rise is a new mixed-use neighborhood planned for the site of a disused shopping mall in Cupertino, California. When complete, it will provide the area with 2,669 new homes, 890 of them designated for low-income households, as well as shops, restaurants, and 1.95 million square feet of office space. Intended to assuage California’s housing crisis, The Rise was granted special planning permission; however, an existing plan was infeasible. Realizing they needed a new plan and with time running out before the window to meet local planning requirements expired, the project’s developer turned to KPF.
Using our web-based platform, Scout, KPF was able to rapidly iterate through a wide variety of building massings, parking schemes, and layouts for the site to find suitable options optimized for views, thermal comfort, and parking efficiency that the design team could further develop. Varying three factors—the ratio of housing units to parking in the podium levels, the towers’ locations atop the podiums, and whether the towers were stepped or straight—KPF generated and analyzed 2,240 permutations of the design scheme in a matter of days. This level of broad analysis provided designers and clients with the confidence to proceed with an ambitious design for a complex and impactful project of this scale.
