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.
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.
With the recent introduction of computer graphics, much attention has been given to the representation of architecture. Floor plans and elevations have remained relatively unchanged, while digital animation and photorealistic renderings have become exciting new means of representation. A problem with the majority of this work and especially photorealistic rendering is that it represents the building as a image and concentrates on how a building looks as opposed to how it works. Often times this "look" is artificial, expressing the incapacity of programs (or their users) to represent the complexities of materials, lighting, and perspective. By using digital representation in a descriptive, less realistic way, one can explore the rich complexities and interrelationships of architecture. Instead of representing architecture as a finished product, it is possible to represent the ideas and concepts of the project.
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.
This paper describes a CAAD teaching strategy in which some Artificial Intelligence techniques are integrated with 3D modelling exploration. The main objective is to lead the students towards "repertoire" acquisition and creative exploration of design alternatives. This strategy is based on dialogue emulation, graphic precedent libraries, and 3D modelling as a medium of design study.
The course syllabus is developed in two parts: a first stage in which the students interact with an intelligent interface that emulates a dialogue. This interface produces advice composed of either precedents or possible new solutions. Textual descriptions of precedents are coupled with graphical illustrations and textual descriptions of possible new solutions are coupled with sets of 3D components. The second and final stage of the course is based on 3D modelling, not simply as a means of presentation, but as a design study medium. The students are then encouraged to get the system’s output from the first stage of the course and explore it graphically. This is done through an environment in which modelling in 3D is straightforward allowing the focus to be placed on design exploration rather than simply on design presentation. The students go back to the first stage for further advice depending on the results achieved in the second stage. This cycle is repeated until the design solution receives a satisfactory assessment.
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