ABSTRACT
The progression of my career-which has taken me from architecture to manufacturing to the world of software development-has afforded me a very unusual cross-disciplinary perspective on the evolution of building industry technology. In my early days of working at Hellmuth, Obata 4-Kassabaum (HOK) and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) back in the 1980s, I can remember when computing was just a small outpost within a large professional firm. From HOK, I went on to a company that developed animation software, and I learned much about the form-making programs that have been widely discussed throughout this book. I then entered the arena of manufacturing, working for a mechanical engineering firm that was very much concerned with the connection between product design and the actual process of manufacturing or “machining” those products. It was at this juncture that I was struck by some startling differences between the two industries.
