What has yet to be CAD (1986)
article⁄What has yet to be CAD (1986)
abstract⁄The theme of this Acadia Conference was to a large extent addressed by Mitchell in his article ‘‘What was Computeraided design’’, published about two years ago. While one has to agree with most of his points, I find his predictions gloomy enough to wish I could disagree. Luckily, Mitchell has chosen to address what the majority of the profession and many architectural schools currently consider to be CAD. It turns out that this CAD is not what CAD is supposed to be. I have, therefore, purposely chosen a title which appears to echo an opposite view. My intention is not to express disagreement but rather to project the other face of CAD, in my own mind, the only CAD which deserves the name. Whether the current CAD should or will be called CAD in the future is of nonessential significance. As teachers of architectural design we need to be concerned that architectural CAD remains, to date, a very immature field. It is CAD only by name, since a true CAD system has yet to be ‘discovered’. This presentation consists of three major sections. The first reviews why the currently available CAD systems do not have the ingredients which may justify them as design oriented machines. This discussion leads to the identification of architectural modeling and knowledge systems as the two main areas which need to be researched so that they may offer the basis for the development of truly design oriented machines. Each is discussed under a separate section, but the point is also made that the two should work handinhand and should be integrated into a completely unified system.
