JISC

Start date: 1 October 1996

End date: 1 May 2000

Funding programme: JISC Technologies Application (JTAP) programme

Project website: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/newvenue/newvenue.htm

Enormous potential now exists for rapid and widespread development of computer-aided urban design (CAUD) within the environment of the virtual studio and design workshop. To date, there have been few applications of computer-based methods in this area, as much because the design process is extensive, it requires diverse synthetic skills, software available has been the prerogative of very specialist disciplines, and there are still powerful and articulate cultural obstacles to CAD in architecture and urban design. Furthermore, there are few computer models of whole building, building contexts, and urban neighbourhoods. This is changing fast. All kinds of software have now migrated to the desktop and this makes good and effective computer-aided urban design a possibility. The availability of detailed geometric data through high resolution remote sensing (RS), of extensive digital spatial data from the Population Census and Ordnance Survey (OS), its representation using geographic information systems (GIS), new models of urban structure based on space syntax, fractal geometry, and cellular automata, and the development of object-oriented computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) packages provide the context for immediate integration of previously unlike and unconnected software within a desktop environment that makes practical design a possibility.

This project will pursue this integration. It will first develop a Rapid Prototype based on GIS and space syntax, embed this into a virtual design environment built around simple sketch planning, and finally extend this to deal with the collection of geometric data using RS. In terms of theory, it will integrate system description, understanding, analysis, and simulation which necessarily precede good design. In terms of software, it will demonstrate how modestly priced proprietary packages based on ERDAS Imagine (RS), ESRI's ArcView 2 (GIS), and UCL's Axman (space syntax) and Pangea (CAAD) can be easily linked to enable students, researchers and practicing architect-planners to generate good design. In terms of disciplines, it integrates software across the spatial sciences from geography to architecture. Finally, it will provide workable tools for sketch planning based on better data and better analysis. These will be tested in a virtual design studio (VDS) which will focus on group learning using our own graduate students and the extensive network of practice-based research which UCL's Bartlett School is pioneering as a test bed for CAAD in world-class architectural practices. It is also supported by the world's two leading software vendors in RS and GIS who will provide free software as well as travel monies ($10K) if the project is funded, and by the OS who will provide free digital map data for the case studies. Our partnership or 'club' - of vendors, ourselves as R&D experts, and student and practician users - is a unique international grouping which, we argue, is essential for the production of top quality software for the design professions in HE and in practice. The products of the project will be purpose written macros, scripts and C code which enable users with access to such low cost software to use CAUD. These will be delivered in the most popular media available, currently CD-ROM and the web.