20 September 2013 – I contrast the challenges of parametric modelling to the challenges associated with software engineering. I introduce the body of knowledge associated with software engineering and hypothesise about which knowledge areas may also help the practice of parametric modelling.
6 August 2013 – A long and incomplete history of parametric modelling. Starting in the nineteenth century with James Dana’s crystal drawings, and ending up in twenty-first century by way of Gaudí, Moretti, Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, and other more recent technological innovations.
9 November 2010 – William Mitchell's The Logic of Architecture is considered seminal to computational design. In this post I put forward the argument that it was actually far from perfect and that the holes in this book can tell us much about the discourse pertaining to computational design.
23 May 2010 – A discussion of the favourite computational design problem of the 1960s: the distance occupants walked. Why this problem captured the interest of so many researchers, and the non-orthogonal way it was eventually solved.
27 February 2010 – Virtually every CAD program has a Graphical User Interface. While they undoubtedly make computing easier, have we lost something through our reliance on them? In this post I posit that interfaces limit as much as they enable.
19 December 2009 – A brief look at the birth of CAD. Ivan Sutherland's 1962 Sketchpad was the first interactive CAD system, which laid the groundwork for much of what we do today, fifty years later.
