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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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.
We argue a way of creating intelligent architecture, not through classical Artificial Intelligence (AI), but rather through Artificial Life (ALife), embracing the aesthetic emergent possibilities that can spontaneously arise from this approach. In order to make these ideas of emergent life more tangible we present this paper in four integrated parts, namely: narrative, material, hardware and computation. The Edge of Chaos installation is an explicit realization of creating emergent systems and translating them into an architectural design. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of a custom CA for maximizing aesthetic impact while minimizing the live time of architectural kinetic elements.
1.Import design from other CAD tools.
2.Assemble an architecture structure from a library of pre-built blocks and geometry primitives dynamically created by user.
3.Export the design interactively in VRML format back to the library for Internet browsing.
The geometry primitives include polygon, sphere, cone, cylinder and cube. The pre-built blocks consist of fundamental architecture models which have been categorized with architectural related style, physical properties and environmental attributes. Upon a user’s request, the tool or the composer, has the ability to communicate with the library which indeed is a back-end distributed client-server database engine. The user may specify any combination of properties and attributes in the composer which will instantly bring up all matching 3-dimensional objects through the database engine. The database is designed in relational model and comes from the work of another research group.
The projects presented here are of three types: (1.) The first project compares people's evaluation of several slightly modified virtual models of a space. (2.) The second project compares how people evaluate a foam core model of a space to how they evaluate a virtual representation of the same space (3.) The third project compares people's evaluation of a real space to that of a virtual representation of this space. //
The wide range of results presented provides one argument in support of using VR simulations to study spaces and how they are perceived. For example, results shows that a virtual window serves to alleviate perceived crowding and that added furniture serves to make a virtual room feel slightly larger and less constraining. However, problems did emerge with using virtual reality simulations to gain information about peoples' behavioral reactions to a space. Thus, not all circumstances under which VR representations are used creates valid results. Differences appear to be in the type of evaluations measured (e.g. dimensional versus behavioral). More research is needed to clarify this issue.
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.
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.
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