CumInCAD is a Cumulative Index about publications in Computer Aided Architectural Design supported by the sibling associations ACADIA, CAADRIA, eCAADe, SIGraDi, ASCAAD and CAAD futures
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In Sweden representatives from the construction and building management industry have put forward a research and development program called: "IT-Bygg#2 2002 - Implementation". It aims at making IT the vehicle for decreasing the building costs and at the same time getting better quality and efficiency out of the industry.
The presented strategy is based on a seminar with some of the most experienced researchers, developers and practitioners of CAD in Sweden. The activities were recorded and annotated, analyzed and put together afterwards.
The proposal in brief is that object oriented distributed CAD is to be used in the long perspective. It will need to be based on international standards such as STEP and it will take at least another 5 years to get established.
Meanwhile something temporary has to be used. Pragmatically a "de facto standard" on formats has to be accepted and implemented. To support new users of IT all software in use in the country will be analyzed, described and published for a national platform for IT-communication within the construction industry.
Finally the question is discussed "How can architect schools then contribute to IT being implemented within the housing sector at a regional or national level?" Some ideas are presented: Creating the good example, better support for the customer, sharing the holistic concept of the project with all actors, taking part in an integrated education process and international collaboration like AVOCAAD and ECAADE.
Cyberspace is an electronic extension of this cognitive space. Designers of virtual environments already know the power these spaces have on the imagination. Computers are no longer just tools for projecting buildings. They change the very substance of design. Cyberspace is itself a subject for design. With computers architects can design space both for physical and non-physical media. A conscious integration of cognitive and physical space in architecture can affect construction and maintenance costs, and the impact on natural and urban environments.
This paper is about the convergence of physical and electronic space and its potential effects on architecture. The first part of the paper will define cognitive space and its relationship to cyberspace. The second part will relate cyberspace to the production of architecture. Finally, a recent project done at the University of Michigan Graduate School of Architecture will illustrate the integration of physical and cyberspaces.
Together these features offer a broader horizon to architectural design. New source of inspiration can be found in virtual reality that makes visible what does not really exist, permitting design to suggest itself with its primordial image. We mean a kind of architectural imprint, where the first three-dimensional lines suggest in some way the designer with their shape, and encourage the definition process.
Through the visualisation of some images, it is possible to show the modifications of language and style, to examine the transformation modalities of the design process and to propose an essay of the new methods to communicate architecture.
In fact, many efforts at international level are in progress to define tools in order to make easier the multiple exchange of information in different fields of building design. Concerning this point, protocol and ontology of structured information interchanges constitute the first steps in this sense, e.g. those under standardisation by ISO (STEP), PDT models and Esprit project ToCEE. To model these problems it has brought forth a new research field: the collaborative design one, an evolution of distributed work and concurrent design.
The CAAD Laboratory of Dipartimento di Architettura and Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria has carried out a software prototype, KAAD, based on Knowledge Engineering in the fields of hospital building and of building for aged people. This software is composed by an Interface, a Knowledge Base, a Database and Constraints. The Knowledge Base has been codified by using the formal structure of frames, and has been implemented by the Lisp language. All the elements of KB are objects
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.
Here we present a second step of development of the analyser: the implementation of some semantic capabilities. The most elementary level of semantics is the simple recognition of each object present in the architectural image. Which, in turn means attributing to each object the name of the class of similar objects to which the single object is supposed to pertain. While at the syntactical level the pertinence to a class implies the identity of an object to the class prototype, at the semantic level this is not compulsory. Pertaining to the same class, that is having the same architectural meaning, can be objects having approximately the same shape. Consequently in order to detect the pertinence of an object to a class, that is giving it an architectural meaning, two things are necessary: a date base containing the class prototypes to which the recognized objects are to be assigned and a tool able to "measure" the difference of two shapes.
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