Computing in Architectural Design

Justin McNair

IAR 311

01/10/12

Professor Tina Sarwigi

Computing in Architectural Design

My gatherings from this chronological history of computer aided design is that we are always trying to find the balance between ease of utility and quality of the product, which is mixed to create the best sense of efficiency possible.  Computers have enhanced design by perfecting what the human hand is incapable of or is much less efficient at but, still in my opinion, at its early stages of conception, the computer comes with many frustrations because it is a more specialized extension of our natural abilities. The essay begins by stating architectures’ need for order in the form of geometry and algorithms, which leads me to believe that we have to organize to maintain civility and the computer, is an extension of that civility.  1^st generation CAD programs were used to support the mathematical engineering in buildings, to enhance the structural load and extend the reaches of material properties.  These programs later became very useful for companies in the automobile and aerospace genres to test performance, structure, and safety.  By the 1970’s, two branches of computer aided design unfolded, one towards engineering and the other towards construction.  The construction branch was more architecturally based but appeared more as diagrammatic solutions for early building concepts rather than full-fledged design building programs we know of today.  2^nd generation CAD programs were meant to placate towards a wider genre of architecture firms rather than just corporation giants through affordable machinery and were focused mainly on basic drafting and modeling abilities still not up to par with professional design work.  It took the advent of making tools faster to really make computers a viable designing engine with breakthroughs in processors, graphics, memory, and raster colored printing.  2^nd generations computer programs focused on a more general geometric language in the form of polygons and NURBS, which was simply more effective for modeling and rendering but more analytically crippling to the first generation programs that worked more naturally with presets of doors, windows, and other architectural components.  While the architectural industry was dumbing down there products for the sake of representational models other engineering industries were making their products more intelligible by encrypting layers of information within their software so that they could tell when the computer model would witness real world conferences.  For example, when silicone would heat up in close contact with another material and become a fire hazard.  As these advances continued the computer began to literally create its own environment, an alternate reality that could predict the outcomes of real life applications while also making communication an instant occurrence.  The computer has become a global environment makeing physical human interaction obsolete except for our own attachment for emotional contact that grounds us again in the reality that we are not machines ourselves.  There is swiftly becoming a breach between what the computer can offer with human interaction and the automation that leaves ourselves tending to only the concepts of our work.