PlaceTwin
A 3D digital twin and studio workspace for two urban-design sites in Ayvalık, built so that every number says where it came from and how far to trust it.
A model that admits what it does not know
Studio models usually draw every building with the same confidence. Here the height of 49 buildings comes from title deeds, 7 from OpenStreetMap, and the remaining 640 are estimates with a stated range. The twin says which is which, on every building, and a field survey promotes a building to the highest class.
Nothing in the scene is decoration. There are no representative cars, street lamps or façade materials: if it is not data, it is not drawn. Counts that depend on incomplete cadastral coverage are shown as lower bounds and labelled provisional until the coverage threshold is met.
From sources to studio
A deterministic build turns open and official sources into one data file and one summary. The panel, the site and the assistant all read that same summary, so the numbers a student sees in three places cannot disagree.
What the twin measures
Two study areas in one scene: A2, the slipway and the old bus station, and B2, the historic customs house, Cumhuriyet Square, the old khans and the Potamos stream.
106 in A2 and 590 in B2, each with source, confidence class and parcel link.
95 and 574, queried one by one at a rate the public service allows.
Mean direct sunlight in open space on 21 December, A2 against B2.
Share of open space with no view of the sea at eye level.
Footprints in an independent dataset but absent from OpenStreetMap, queued for field checks.
18 for A2 and 17 for B2, compiled with citations. Informational, not an official plan.
Answers come from the twin, not from memory
The studio panel has a Claude assistant with ten tools. Eight of them read and manage the panel itself: the sixteen-week calendar, tasks, assignments, deliverables and the decision log. The other two are the grounding.
- Building lookup. Finds up to five buildings by number, name or block and parcel, and returns area, storeys, height, the data's confidence class and source, the parcel and any field record.
- Plan and policy lookup. Searches a sourced compilation of plans, zoning and conservation rules, decision authority, actors and disputes, and cites what it returns.
Selecting a building in the 3D scene and choosing “ask the assistant” carries that selection into the conversation as context, so the question starts from the place rather than from a description of it.
Sixty seconds through the twin
The introduction film made for the studio. Every number on screen matches the twin's summary file. The panel ships under the name Kızak; narration text is in Turkish.
An information tool, not an official plan document. Risk layers are open-data screening, not hazard maps. 640 of 696 building heights are estimates. Official data still missing: seismic design parameters, the base map, the conservation plan, the listed-building register and an approved shoreline. The repository is private and the site sits behind a login, so nothing here links out.