CAD/CAM in the Business of Architecture, Engineering and Construction

摘要

The advanced descriptive, analytical and communicative capabilities of digital tools are encouraging their ever wider adoption in the building industry, which is now beginning to come to grips with the practicalities of leveraging the computing power that has revolutionised the industrial design, electronics, aircraft, boat-building and auto industries. A significant number of architects have been encouraged by these technologies to propose and undertake projects of much greater complexity (whether formal, organisational or both) than are found in conventional contemporary practice, and the engineers and builders with whom they work are correspondingly challenged to bring CAD/CAM to bear in their own work. But it is precisely this concept of 'their own' work that poses the largest questions, the greatest challenges: in blurring the lines between architecture, engineering and building, what becomes of the lines of ownership and responsibility?