From Facade

Prof. Mitchell

MIT Professor Bill Mitchell, chair of the FACADE Advisory Board, presented a paper by he and Professor Larry Sass (MIT), at the May 2008 conference celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of Andrea Palladio, entitled "Architectural Representations."

• Architectural Representations - paper‎ [12.5 Mb] 26-page .PDF of MS-Word .DOC (includes some ten pictures)
• From Drawing Collections to Virtual Museums - slides‎ [17.5 Mb] 11-page .PDF of PPT presentation (same group of pictures)

Conference

http://www.cisapalladio.org/index.php?lingua=e

Sponsored by the 'Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio'
CISA A.Palladio, Contra' Porti 11, I-36100 Vicenza - Italy

FACADE

An excerpt mentioning this FACADE project at MIT:

[pp. 12-13]

"...The record of design exploration through assigning values to parameters is also potentially interesting. Consider, for example, the parameterization and exploration of Frank Gehry’s digital models for the Bilbao Guggenheim and the Disney Concert Hall. The technical difficulty, though, is that there are currently no widely agreed, stable standards for long-term preservation of parametric models.

To serve the immediate daily needs of the architectural and engineering professions, there are neutral data format standards, such as ISO-STEP and IFC, for the exchange of CAD models. These do not maintain parametric information, but this is less of a limitation than it may seem in practice contexts, since practitioners can always return to whatever parametric software tools they employ when further parametric work is needed. However, these formats do not meet the needs of cultural memory institutions, which must try to ensure continued reliable access to CAD models (including parametric information if possible) over archival timeframes, when it is likely that the CAD systems that generated the models will no longer be available.

A research project called FACADE, at MIT, is currently focused on this issue, using as cases digital models of major buildings by Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, Thom Mayne, and others. FACADE is assessing existing neutral data format standards for their suitability for archival purposes. But the task of finding or creating viable standards for archiving parametric models is very difficult, and there is a real danger that many valuable models resulting from recent and current practice – and representing a crucial moment in the transition to digital practice – will be lost."