HISTORY,CREDITS

Course history

This course began to be forged in the summer of 1990. The original idea was to create a series of exercises that would allow students to understand, in an active way, some fundamental principles of computer modelling. The TYPES and INSTANCES paradigm was the basic idea around which the exercises were built.

The first edition of the course took place in the Winter semester of 1990-91. Afterwards, the course has been offered every Winter semeseter. The basic structure of the exercises has remained, although their format, content and number has varied to suit them better to the students' needs.

The conception and development of the course can be traced in the following publications.You can see also the poster designs of the different semesters.

The computer tools

A computer tool was designed to support the ideas on which the exercises were based. This computer tool, programmed with AutoLISP and running in conjunction with AutoCAD,was built upon the principles of object-oriented modelling. It allows to create a vocabulary of forms and to keep them organized in a variety of ways. For example, for a given form, or type, multiple variations of it can be created and easily stored. An important part of the tool is the graphic interface. The components stored in the library are displayed are displayed as icons. The operations to insert or to replace an object by another object or variation can be done by simply choosing the object on the screen. Basically, the graphic interface provides an easier accessibility to a library of objects than the one offered by the standard program.

Credits

The original idea of the exercises, as well as the pedagogic approach, was conceived by Leandro Madrazo during the years 1990-91. Later refinements in the format of the exercises came as a result of students feed back as well as from suggestions of teachers of the course.

In the past editions of the course, the different groups of students have been taught by the following persons:

The programming of the TYPES and INSTANCES tool was the result of the combined effort of different members of the Chair for Architecture and CAAD: Bharat Dave, Maia Engeli, Earl Mark, Annelies Zeidler, as well as Hans Uli Matter, Sharon Refvem, Claude Vezin and Leandro Madrazo. A later update of the tool to AutoCAD 12 was carried out by Maia Engeli and Wade Yokoda.