Preliminary layout design of buildings has a substantial effect on the ultimate design of structural components and accordingly influences the construction cost. Exploring structurally efficient forms and shapes during the conceptual design stage of a project can also facilitate the optimum integrated design of buildings. This paper presents an automated method of determining column layout design of rectilinear orthogonal building frames using Charged System Search (CSS) algorithm. The layout design problem is presented as a combinatorial optimization problem named multi-dimensional knapsack problem by setting some constraints to the problem, where the minimum cost and maximum plan regularity are the objectives. The efficiency and robustness of CSS to solve the combinatorial optimization problem are demonstrated through a numerical design problem. The results of the algorithm are compared to those of an ant colony algorithm in order to validate the solution.