ABSTRACT
One of the issues that has been of central concern in this book has been the expressive power of CAD environments. One manifestation of the improvements in expressiveness has been the ability to be able to express parametric relationships. This occurred in several of the case studies, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Sagrada Familia in particular. A major benefit of parameterisation is that in the description of curved surfaces, relatively few control points can effectively describe a wide range of surface profiles. It then is up to the designer to modify the locations of control points to achieve the desired forms. It is interesting to note here that some of the large-scale CAD projects described in the case studies have exploited developments in parametric design software that originated in the field of mechanical engineering.
