Architecture's New Media: Principles, Theories, and Methods of Computer-Aided Design

Walk into a bookstore and look at the Architecture section—most of the books you will find here are focused on showcasing the works of various signature architects around the world or on different aspects of architectural design theory such as standards, building types and styles, the history of architecture, materials, landscaping, and so on. Despite the fact that computer technology has been firmly established in design practice for close to two decades now, books dealing with the use of technology in architectural design are still few and far between. While a number of books are available on many of the specific applications used by architects—there are probably several shelves of books on AutoCAD alone—very little is available on the general theory of computing in architectural design. During my days as a Ph.D. student whose focus was on technology, I felt this dearth of literature in the field very keenly. It is therefore heartening to see some new books being published that are dedicated to plugging this gap in the pedagogy of architectural design. Architecture's New Media: Principles, Theories, and Methods of Computer-Aided Design is one such book, and this review—the first book review in AECbytes—takes a look inside its pages to see what it can offer to students, researchers, and practitioners of architecture.

Overview of the Book

Architecture's New Media is authored by Yehuda E. Kalay, a Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, who has been teaching and researching in the area of computer-aided architectural design for over 20 years. He is the author of five previous books on various aspects of computer-aided design, and also serves as Editor-in-Chief for Architecture and Engineering of the journal, Automation in Construction, the key journal for research work in this field. His extensive teaching, research, and writing experience are in ample evidence in the weighty 500+ pages of Architecture's New Media, published exactly 10 years after his last book. It consolidates the key content of all his earlier books (most of which I have read during the course of my Ph.D.), and expands upon it by discussing current research work, some examples from professional practice, and recent computing technologies that have emerged in the industry.

As the title of the book suggests, it aims to help readers understand the principles, the theories, and the methods that underlie the application of information technology to architecture. To this end, it divides the subject matter into five main sections, which are briefly described below.

The introductory section lays the groundwork for the rest of the content by exploring the nature of design, the fundamentals of computing, and how the two have come together in the form of computer-aided design systems over the past fifty years. The section on design looks at three main aspects: the process, which involves problem analysis, solution synthesis, evaluation, and communication; the paradigms, which include problem-solving, where alternative solutions are generated and evaluated until a satisfactory solution is found, and puzzle-making, where given parts are composed into unique and coherent wholes; and finally, the methods used to arrive at a particular solution, including trial-and-error searches, constraint-satisfaction methods, rule-based design, and precedent-based design methods. A concise history of computing is presented along with details on operating systems, the different types of programming languages, and how algorithms are developed to solve problems computationally. The book then traces the history of computer-aided architectural design, starting with Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad system developed in 1963, all the way through to the third generation of knowledge-based, object-oriented CAD systems. The introductory section concludes by looking at the different kinds of roles computing can play in architectural design: as a design tool, design assistant, means of communication, and design environment; and more recently, in creating ever-changing physical environments as well as virtual environments in cyberspace.

The second section is focused on communication, and deals with how designers communicate with themselves as well as how they communicate with the other members of the design team. In the context of technology, the issue of communication becomes that of representation, of how the design and other related aspects such as design criteria, design rationale, component information, and so on can be electronically captured. Representation can range from abstractions such as a bubble diagram to a fully detailed, information rich 3D model that can be rendered with full photorealism, and the book discusses the principles underlying all the various methods of representation, including computer graphics, databases and data structures, geometric models, and product models. It also highlights the representational problem of the many separate, discipline-specific "worldviews" of the building design that are maintained by the different disciplinary professionals, how they lead to conflicts, and how these conflicts can be managed and resolved.

Next, the book turns to the process of synthesis, of how candidate solutions satisfying the project's requirements are generated for consideration by the client. In current practice, all synthesis is done in the architect's head and the computer is used simply to translate the synthesized design concepts into the desired representation, be it a 2D drawing or a 3D model. But researchers have been attempting to develop computer tools that can actually generate design solutions—commonly referred to as generative design systems —and this section of the book provides an overview of these efforts. It also covers the basic computational principles that underlie generative systems, including procedural and heuristic design methods, expert systems, shape grammars, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. Generative systems are a controversial and difficult topic—the idea that a computer can design will be dismissed by most people as far-fetched—and the books weighs on this issue by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a computer's synthesizing ability.

The next section deals with a concept much more rooted in the realm of current-day practice, computer-aided evaluation of building design. It involves predicting the performance of a design along various aspects to determine whether it achieves the specified objectives and criteria. Computational evaluation of performance requires not only the design solution to be explicitly represented but also the goals against which it must be measured to be explicitly represented, and therein lies the challenge of developing effective and sophisticated evaluation tools. The book discusses many aspects related to evaluation, including the representation of design goals, the methods used for prediction, the distinction between hard constraints and soft constraints, and multicriteria and multilevel evaluation. It also provides specific examples of the application of computer-aided evaluation to aspects such as structures, energy, acoustics, habitability, and aesthetics.

The concluding section of the book looks ahead into the not-too-distant future and explores the impact of recent advances in computing and telecommunications on the processes and products of architecture. This includes the role of the Internet in facilitating distributed, collaborative design, the development of intelligent design agents that can solve specific problems autonomously and serve as assistants in the design process, entire design systems that integrate multiple design agents and provide a sophisticated collaborative design environment, automated building procurement and fabrication, smart building materials and controls that make for intelligent buildings, and the development and inhabitation of virtual places in cyberspace. Some of these concepts are already in evidence in the real world, while others are still being worked out in the research community. The book concludes by discussing how information technology has transformed the practice of architecture in the past and predicts that it will continue to do so in the future.

Review

Architecture's New Media is meticulously researched and provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of the origins, theory, and principles of computer-aided design. Its value as an educational resource is unquestionable. It will make an excellent textbook for architectural students being introduced to computer-aided design, and can serve as a valuable source of reference for educators in the field. The research community will appreciate the synthesis of all the key research work in the field in one resource. The book can also be useful to developers of architectural design software, allowing them to understand the broader context within which they are operating.

For architectural practitioners, Architecture's New Media would afford a better understanding of the field of computer-aided design and an insight into the large amount of academic research that has been conducted in this field, much of which we don't hear much about in the industry at all. It can also give them a glimpse of future possibilities in architectural computing. A good example of this is the concept of generative design systems described earlier—applications that can design some aspects of the building such as a preliminary space layout, a structural configuration, and so on, based on specified criteria. Researchers have been working in this area for decades and have developed prototype solutions for specific problems, but we still have no such system on the market. Another example is rule-based expert systems, which can capture rules about different design aspects and can be used to evaluate a design. While we do have applications in the industry for evaluating aspects such as energy and cost, none of them can provide any expert feedback on the design and suggest recommendations based on the results of the evaluation. By becoming aware of what researchers in the field of computer-aided architectural design have envisaged and are working towards, practitioners can see that we're merely on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to harnessing the potential of computer technology—there's still so much more that can be done. This is a valuable understanding and is one of the most compelling reasons why a book like this is relevant to the profession at large rather than just the academic community.

This is not a "how-to" book at all, so those looking for practical tips on how to better utilize computer applications for architectural design will not find it here. The book covers several abstract concepts and some mathematical ones as well, so it is by no means a light or easy read. It is the kind of book that is best digested at a slow pace, one that you come back to from time to time to study specific topics. Mastering the origins, theory, and principles of computer-aided design is not something one would attempt to do anyway in a matter of days or even weeks; it would likely take months.

While the content of the book occasionally gets quite dry, it is to the author's credit that the writing style is very readable, without the usually pedantry that characterizes most academic writing. This makes the book very accessible and easy to assimilate by students and practitioners alike. There are lots of illustrations that serve well to elucidate the content. Color illustrations are limited to a six page insert, which is somewhat of a pity in a book that deals with the application of technology to a field as visual as architecture.

The only real drawback of the book is that it is too heavily weighted on using academic research to elucidate the theory and principles of computer-aided design and does not devote much footage to the latest developments in the industry. Recent years have seen dramatic and exciting changes in the architectural profession on the technology front with the introduction and widespread adoption of conceptual design tools such as SketchUp and Piranesi, building information modeling (BIM) tools such as ArchiCAD, Autodesk Revit, and Bentley Architecture, project websites such as Constructware and Buzzsaw, and electronic publishing solutions such as PDF and DWF. The book does not talk about these applications and how they relate to the theory and principles of computer-aided design. It could also have included many more examples of how technology is actually being used in architectural practices, particularly by those who are using it in cutting-edge ways. I only found one such example described in some detail, the Experience Music Project in Seattle by Frank Gehry's firm.

This omission does not, however, detract from the overall usefulness of the book as a well-written and consolidated resource for learning all about the history, theory, and principles of computer-aided architectural design, for anyone who is working in the architectural profession or developing software for it.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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