From: rwzobel@unity.ncsu.edu (Rick Zobel)
Subject: Re: DESIGN: Architectural Design
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1993 14:35:21 GMT
Organization: North Carolina State University Computing Center


In article <1op6v5INNoqk@shelley.u.washington.edu> thinman@netcom.com (Technically Sweet) writes:
>
>Possibly the architects will be happier if they are placed not in
>OfficeFurnitureWorld but in PipesGirders&StrutsWorld.  Visual
>representations of the unseeable are to me far more interesting than
>texture-mapped this and gouraud-shaded that.

I agree. Human scaled form is unseeable to the designer until after
completion of the design. The form of a design at the early stages
has nothing to do with textures, shading, or even pipes, girders
and struts. It has to do with being able to experience form (space)
and availing the information necessary to understand the space
correctly. Architectural design happens in stages: Preliminary
design; Design development; Bidding/Negotiation; Construction
Documents and finally construction management and post occupancy 
evaluations. Each of these need different information avalable
to the designer to enable them to create better designs.

>Form is not content!  You can see this by sitting down at any
>X-windowed computer after using a Mac.  The fundamental mistake that
>VR people make is to mistake the outside for the inside, to assume
>that creating forms creates content as well.

Unless the form is the content! The form is outside, inside and
throughout architecture. It is in some respects reciprocal. The
form allows for visualization of the content which in this case
is the form. This is usually not true for other disciplines and
other types of information, and true only in the early phases of
architectural design. I agree with you that in general form is 
not content, and that this is a major issue for virtual worlds.

>Here's a rendering experiment for an architectural walkthrough: Make
>the walls and desks and chairs quasi-transparent, and show the pipes
>and conduits and struts inside the walls.  Show the building as it
>really is.

And another, possibly more difficult experiment. Create a correctly
sized/scaled immersive environment in which a user can correctly judge
distance, scale and size at any number of distances from the observer.
(How this part of this thread started)

>[L.N.'s .sig] Data is not information is not knowledge is not wisdom.

Right!

Rick Zobel 
NCSU School of Design
Architecture Department
rick@oscar.sod.ncsu.edu