All three studios tested notions of representation, simulation and the design process in relation to a post-industrial world and its impact on how we design for it. The sites for two of these studios were in the city of Berlin, where the spearhead of the information age and a leftover of the industrial revolution overlap in an urban condition that is representative of our world after the cold war. The three studios describe a progressive shift in the use of information technology in the design process, from nearly pure image-driven simulation to a more low-tech, highly creative uses of everyday computing tools. Combined, all three cases describe an array of scenarios for content-supportive uses of digital media in a design studio. The first studio described here, from USC, utilized computer modeling and visualization to design a building for a site located within the former no-mans' land of the Berlin Wall. The second studio, from SCI-Arc, produced an urban design proposal for an area along the former Berlin Wall and included a pan-geographic design collaboration via Internet between SCI-Arc/Los Angeles and SCI-Arc/Switzerland. The third and last studio from Woodbury University participated in the 1997 ACSA/Dupont Laminated Glass Competition designing a consulate general for Germany and one for Hong Kong. They employed a hybrid digital/non-digital process extracting experiential representations from simple chipboard study models and then using that information to explore an "enhanced model" through digital imaging processes.

The end of the cold war was coincidental with the explosive popularization of information technology as a consumer product and is poised to have huge impact on how and what we design for our cities. Few places in world express this potential as does the city of Berlin. These three undergraduate design studios employed consumer-grade technology in an attempt to make a difference in how we design, incorporating discussions of historical change, ideological premise and what it means to be an architect in a world where image and content can become easily disconnected from one another.

This paper discusses the process for developing digital interpretations of the Teocalli or Ceremonial Precinct of Tenochtitlan based on historical, iconographical, and archaeological materials. To this end, digital models were constructed by taking into consideration Aztec archaeoastronomical principles and measuring systems. The result is an interactive view of the Ceremonial Precinct, perhaps the most comprehensive since Tenochtitlan was destroyed more than 500 years ago. This project has been recently published on CD-ROM.

But a very rigorous design is not always enough to start restoration work. The real state that presents a historical building could have been modified substantially from its original state due to previous interventions, wars, seismic movements, erosion, biological aggressions or any other historical event.

So, it is necessary to join CAAD tasks with a simulation of the historical process suffered by the building. Historical data and ancient cartography must be the basis of all the CAAD works, and the quality of the computer 3D model can be established comparing it with the original available maps.

This paper explains the CAAD works and the intervention proposals for the restoration of the City Walls of Hondarribia, a small Spanish village placed in the frontier between Spain and France. These Renaissance bastioned walls were partially destroyed throughout many wars with France. The exact knowledge of their original trace and dimensions only is possible comparing the real CAD models with the plans that exist in the Spanish Military Archives since the XVIth. century.

The digital store and index of all the historical information, their comparison with real photographs of the city walls, the creation of photo realistic images with the intervention proposals, and the influence of the structural repairs in the final project will be explained in the CAAD context.

Digital media have a significant and strategic role to play toward this end. Of particular value are representational strategies that help disentangle issues, clarify alternatives and evaluate consequences of very complex and often emotional issues of land use, planning and design. This paper reports on the ELEMENTS OF NEIGHBORHOOD, a prototype 'electronic notebook' (relational database) tool developed to bring design information and example 'to the table' of a public workshop. Elements are examples of the building blocks of neighborhood (open spaces, housing, commercial, industrial, civic and network land uses) derived from built examples, and illustrated with graphic, narrative and numeric representations relevant to planning, design, energy, environmental and economic performance. Quantitative data associated with the elements can be linked to Geographic Information based maps and spreadsheet based-evaluation models.