CAD in the Design Studio: The Discovery of Inhabitation (1993)
article⁄CAD in the Design Studio: The Discovery of Inhabitation (1993)
abstract⁄The impact of CAD on the design process itself has to date been negligible. The vast majority of architects using information technology in the design of buildings have been either jobtrained, viewing CAD as an optimization tool, or educated in academic programs where CAD is treated as a specialized subject, isolated from the core design studios and allowing for the perpetuation of manufacturing systems based ideologies which have changed very little over the last century. The tragedy is that this is happening while the design studios themselves explore vastly more complex and contemporary issues highlighted by the works of architecture’s avantgard. The result is a constant, perverse repetition of arcane, industrialage processes spilling over into informationage environments, constituting a misuse of the electronic medium one that could offer the possibility of restating conceptual spatial exploration by its own definition and enabling students and by extension the profession to envision and test the design of the built environment from its most essential aspect, that of inhabitation. There is a synthetic chunk of universe at our fingertips where we can explore space not as an abstraction but as a phenomenological experience, allowing us to exercise our freedom to move and possibly regain our condition of Modernity.
