Within contemporary digital environments, there are increasing opportunities to explore and evaluate design proposals which integrate both architectural and landscape aspects. The production of integrated design solutions exploring buildings and their surrounding context is now possible through the design development of shared 3-D and 4-D virtual environments, in which buildings no longer float in space.

The scope of landscape design has expanded through the application of techniques such as GIS allowing interpretations that include social, economic and environmental dimensions. In architecture, for example, object-oriented CAD environments now make it feasible to integrate conventional modelling techniques with analytical evaluations such as energy calculations and lighting simulations. These were all ambitions of architects and landscape designers in the 70s when computer power restricted the successful implementation of these ideas. Instead, the commercial trend at that time moved towards isolated specialist design tools in particular areas. Prior to recent innovations in computing, the closely related disciplines of architecture and landscape have been separated through the unnecessary development, in our view, of their own symbolic representations, and the subsequent computer applications. This has led to an unnatural separation between what were once closely related disciplines.

Significant increases in the performance of computers are now making it possible to move on from symbolic representations towards more contextual and meaningful representations. For example, the application of realistic materials textures to CAD-generated building models can then be linked to energy calculations using the chosen materials. It is now possible for a tree to look like a tree, to have leaves and even to be botanicaly identifiable. The building and landscape can be rendered from a common database of digital samples taken from the real world. The complete model may be viewed in a more meaningful way either through stills or animation, or better still, through a total simulation of the lifecycle of the design proposal. The model may also be used to explore environmental/energy considerations and changes in the balance between the building and its context most immediately through the growth simulation of vegetation but also as part of a larger planning model.

The Internet has a key role to play in facilitating this emerging collaborative design process. Design professionals are now able via the net to work on a shared model and to explore and test designs through the development of VRML, JAVA, whiteboarding and video conferencing. The end product may potentially be something that can be more easily viewed by the client/user. The ideas presented in this paper form the basis for the development of a dual course in landscape and architecture. This will create new teaching opportunities for exploring the design of buildings and sites through the shared development of a common computer model.

The main reasons that may explain this situation can be identified rather easily, although there will be significant differences of opinion. Mine is that it is a mistake trying to advance too rapidly and, for instance, propose integrated design methods using expert systems and artificial intelligence resources when do not have still an adequate tool to generate and modify simple 3D models.

The modelling tools we have at the present moment are clearly unsatisfactory. Their principal limitation is the lack of appropriate instruments to modify interactively the model once it has been created. This is a fundamental aspect in any design activity, where the designer is constantly going forward and backwards, reelaborating once and again some particular aspect of the model, or its general layout, or even coming back to a previous solution that had been temporarily abandoned.

For this reason, and because not always is arranged the best possible documentation, we consider that the majority of vectorisations they exist in the market don’t plenty satisfied our needs as teaching staff of graphic expression and CAD, althoug we can always be using the same systems of projection or codified representations, it is imposed a lot of times to interpret acording the context the different signs and graphic registers used.

We know experimental applications that go beyond, they even arrive to generate a 3D model from a lifted hand draw that represents three orthogonal projections of it, but it isn’t less certain that its utility is restricted to fields very specialised and the option that we propose, there is not knowledge at least to us that it exist; commercially speaking.

Our porpose has been to develope a symple metedology of vectorisation but adapted to the special idiosyncrasy of the needs of an architecture student that with frequency for his formation requires to generate with CAD models 2D and 3D of architectural projects from the information contented in magazines, and with them create several formas analysis.

The most important difference in the matter to other systems is the interactivity of the procedure that let personify the exit file, even the wide diversity of graphic registers that it exist in the entrance, being the user only once has to identify and interpret the signs to detect, and then the process is realized automatically to any plant of the building or equivalent projection.