ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, most architects were in the middle of replacing pen-and-ink methods of drawing with computer-aided design (CAD) programs. Travelling to attend meetings or to visit a construction site, architects would be disconnected from their colleagues, sometimes for days on end. If something urgently needed their attention back at the office, delivering a message to ‘phone home’ was an assistant’s nightmare. By the 1990s, desktop PCs were powerful enough to support commercially available CAD software, and cheap enough to replace pen and ink for designers across all industries. CAD training became synonymous with architecture training and programs have continued to become increasingly user-friendly ever since. Architects can control geometries with digital tools, rather than understanding them mathematically, and iterative methods allow novel solutions to structural and organisational problems to be found. Typically, architects are likely to run into three types of additive manufacturing: fused deposition modelling, binder jetting and stereolithography.
