Daniel Cardoso Llach

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Department of Architecture

This paper proposes software reconstruction as a method to shed new light into the material, gestural, and sensual dimensions of computer-aided design technologies. Specifically, it shows how by combining historical research and creative prototyping this method can bring us closer to distant ways of seeing, touching, drawing, and designing—while ra...

Up until the early 1980s, when many architectural offices around the world adopted them, computers had been predominately the luxury of a few architectural firms and academic institutions. For example, since the early 1960s emblematic firms such as Skidmore Owings and Merril (SOM) in the United States, ARUP in the United Kingdom, and Clorindo Testa...

This chapter shows how technical and conceptual innovations brought about by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) research during the 1960s and 1970s foreshadow current practices of building design and construction, and are foundational to a modern epistemology of the image in the age of simulation. No longer construed as pictorial representations of a desi...

A metaphor of weightlessness and immateriality dominates computational discourses about design. Digital information, it is often assumed, travels seamlessly through invisible networks in its disembodied binary form—existing merely as a symbolic entity. Despite recent appeals to design’s materiality, particularly in discourses about digital fabricat...

This paper explores the potential of distributed emulation networks to support research and pedagogy into historical and sociotechnical aspects of software. Emulation is a type of virtualization that re-creates the conditions for a piece of legacy software to operate on a modern system. The paper first offers a review of Computer-Supported Cooperat...

This article draws from primary historical sources to examine the origin of, and tensions between, two postwar era modeling techniques that shaped the early history of computer-aided design: the plex, developed by Douglas T. Ross, and the Coons patch, developed by Steven A. Coons. The article shows how each of these two techniques can be seen as em...

This paper presents an abbreviated summary of previous work using a distributed emulation network (EaaSI) to allow for the analysis of computer assisted design (CAD) tools including multiple versions of the popular AutoCAD system. It elaborates on the use of EaaSI in a graduate seminar on the history of computational design, presenting a design ped...

This article critically overviews the evolving portrayal of Latin American architecture and urban design, particularly by United States and European observers, as the realization of a modernist aspiration to align design with social causes. With a focus on the coupling of architectural and nation-building projects in Colombia, the article urges for...

This paper documents a computational approach to the design, fabrication, and assembly of customizable space structures built entirely out of flat-cut interlocking elements without the need of nodes, fasteners, cement, or glue. Following a Research by Design (RbD) methodology, we establish a framework comprising geometric and parametric modeling, s...

This paper presents Hybrid Embroidery, a framework for interactive fabrication that leverages computational methods to broaden the possibilities of the craft of embroidery. Combining embroidery techniques, generative design methods, computer vision and a computerized embroidery machine, we show how this framework elicits a variety of innovative fab...

Contemporary WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) design software utilizes digital Artboards which are finite graphics frames that sit atop a scrollable zooming canvas; where many graphics frames can be arbitrarily arranged, scaled and duplicated to explore and juxtapose design ideas. Despite creative practitioners increasingly writing code to ex...

This article documents and reflects upon a pedagogical project aimed at fostering critical engagements with technology in the context of a graduate research and learning laboratory at the nexus of computer science, design, engineering, and architecture. With the notions of critical technical practice and reflective practice as touchstones, the proj...

This paper reports on the analytical potential of machine learning methods for urban analysis. It documents a new method for data-driven urban analysis based on diagrammatic images describing each building in a city in relation to its immediate urban context. By statistically analyzing architectural and contextual features in this new dataset, the...

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and its sub-branch machine learning (ML) promise machines that go beyond the boundaries of automation and behave autonomously. Applications of these machines in creative practices such as art and design entail relationships between users and machines that have been described as a form of collabora...

This paper introduces a novel framework for urban analysis that leverages computational techniques, along with established urban research methods, to study how people use urban public space. Through three case studies in different urban locations in Europe and the US, it demonstrates how recent machine learning and computer vision techniques may as...

The scale and socio-technical complexity of contemporary architectural production poses challenges to researchers and practitioners interested in their description and analysis. This paper discusses the novel use of network analysis techniques to study a dataset comprising thousands of design conflicts reported during design coordination of a large...

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and its sub-branch machine learning (ML) promise machines that go beyond the boundaries of automation and behave autonomously. Applications of these machines in creative practices such as art and design entail relationships between users and machines that have been described as a form of "collabor...

Nicht weniger als von einer Revolution ist gegenwärtig die Rede. Neuere Verfahren der Künstlichen Intelligenz greifen in sämtliche Bereiche des sozialen und kulturellen Lebens ein: Maschinen lernen Bilder und Sprache zu erkennen, beherrschen die autonome Steuerung von Fahrzeugen ebenso wie Finanzinvestments und medizinische Diagnostik. Im digitalen...

"Archaeology of CAD" is an ongoing project that examines the origins of Computer-Aided Design by bringing to life some of its pioneering technologies, which were central to re-shape design practices in the image of computation during the second half of the twentieth century. On display at SIGGRAPH will be two interactive installations from this pro...

A founding member of the Computer-Aided Design Group at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a student and collaborator of CAD pioneer Steven A. Coons at MIT, Robin Forrest occupies an important place in the history of computational design. Along with important contributions to the mathematics of shape representation, his coining of the term ‘compu...

This paper presents two design experiments in playful architectural adaptability. The first is a tangible computational interface for the design of artifacts such as chairs. Framed within user-driven customization precedents and literature, it suggests ways in which computation can enable new ways of interacting with design knowledge. The second is...

Fueled by long-standing dreams of both material efficiency and aesthetic liberation, robots have become part of mainstream architectural discourses, raising the question: How may we nurture an ethos of visual, tactile, and spatial exploration in technologies that epitomize the legacies of industrial automation—for example, the pursuit of managerial...

This paper explores ways to incorporate robots into design education, especially in architecture, in ways that privilege students' visual, tactile and spatial engagement with design problems. The paper is informed by constructionist theories of learning and studies of science and technology (STS) re-thinking agency as relational and distributed. We...

Research on delivering high quality energy-related information on users’ activities and consumption rates signify the effectiveness of such information for inspiring and motivating users to change their behavior towards more energy saving ones. However, the issue of making these behavior changes durable and integrated to one’s lifestyle is still re...

Energy production is typically a regional enterprise, with the majority of energy produced far from the main areas of demand causing tremendous problems in terms of lack of resiliency and flexibility in handling the ever changing demands at the user's end. On the other hand, microgrids as local energy infrastructures have offered resiliency by allo...

Builders of the Vision traces the intellectual history and contemporary practices of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Numerical Control since the years following World War II until today. Drawing from primary archival and ethnographic sources, it identifies and documents the crucial ideas shaping digital design technologies since the first numerical...

This dissertation identifies and documents a "technological imagination of design" emerging around the reconfigured discourses of design and design representation by the culture of technology production in the Computer-Aided Design Project, a Cold War era research operation funded by the US Air Force at MIT, tracing it into its contemporary deploym...

Between 1959 and 1967, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the pioneering Computer-Aided Design Project, funded by the US Air Force. Engineers, researchers and students were brought together to re-imagine ‘design in the language of the machine’, and one of the most renowned students on this programme was Ivan Sutherland, the inve...

Este artículo revela un aspecto hasta ahora sin examinar de la conexión entre la cultura de investigación militar surgida en MIT durante la Guerra Fría y el discurso arquitectónico contemporáneo. Acudiendo a fuentes primarias del Proyecto de Diseño Asistido por Computador (1959-1967), el artículo muestra el surgimiento de una "filosofía cibernética...

Beyond the debate about the possible advantages of the automation of time-consuming drafting tasks, or of the expressive qualities that emerge from the use of scripts in architectural design, this article posits the idea that scripts constitute a new kind of "design artifact", reconfiguring a designer's engagement with a design problem. By examinin...

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51). Much of the current research in Design and Computation for Architecture proposes to automate the production of construction information as a means of freeing architects from the sticky and inconvenient contingencies of...