From CAD to digital modeling : the necessary hybridization of processes

The essay deals with the themes of digital representation of architecture starting from several years of teaching activity which is growing within the course of Automatic Design of the degree course in Engineering/Architecture in the University of Trento. With the development of CAD systems, architectural representation lies less in the tracking of a simple graph and drawn deeper into a series of acts of building a complex digital model, which can be used as a data base on which to report all the stages of project and interpretation work, and from which to derive final drawings and documents. The advent of digital technology has led to increasing difficulty in finding explicit connections between one type of operation and the subsequent outcome; thereby increasing need for guidelines, the need to understand in order to precede the changes, the desire not to be overwhelmed by uncontrollable influences brought by technological hardware and software systems to use only in accordance with the principle of maximum productivity. Formation occupies a crucial role because has the ability to direct the profession toward a thoughtful and selective use of specific applications; teaching must build logical routes in the fluid world of info-graphics and the only way to do so is to describe its contours through method indications: this will consist in understanding, studying and divulging what in its mobility does not change, as procedural issues, rather than what is transitory in its fixity, as manual questions.