No_4_April_1969 — Page 18

straightforward job for a computer system to cost an architect's design, produce bills of quantities, and to carry out the contractor's estimations automatically.

There are also many other areas of application to be incorporated in the system, such as heat loss calculations, lighting level considerations and acous- tic characteristics (already a number of universities, such as Liverpool, have carried out experiments on these activities).

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Another useful computer output device is a graph plotter. These units can either be controlled by a computer or by their own logic and used to con- vert stored design information into an accurate drawing on paper.

Another computer program used with the graph plotter can give isome- tric and perspective drawings of any building or structure. The computer, having in store plan and elevation details of the building, will automatical- ly produce on the graph plotter the

An operator using a light-pen on the Elliott 4100 in the Division of Computer Science at the National Physical Laboratory. The installation is being used for research into the uses of a graphical display system as an aid to 'conversational' programming

isometric or perspective view of that building as seen from any specified viewing angle. Another useful techni- que now available with graph plotters is an automatic conversion of Imperial measurements into metric measure-

ments.

One of the first comprehensive applications of computers to a large scale architectural project was investi- gated by architect Boyd Auger who was commissioned to prepare a scheme for the island of Isola Dino, off the Italian coast. The scheme called for the development of a new private village for summer residence. How- ever, the rocky terrain prevented the construction from being approached in a traditional manner and from a design point of view appeared very complex.

Feasibility study

Auger therefore proposed a multi- layer space frame providing 1,500 flats and villas, 450 hotel rooms with shops, a marina, a monorail transport system, and a cable car link to the mainland. All these were to be placed in various combinations of modules at all levels. To overcome the time wasting activity of manually producing three-dimen- sional designs, Boyd Auger used a 4100 computer at ICL's computer bureau in Borehamwood, UK, to carry out a feasi- bility study on the application of a computer on the design of Isola Dino.

To do this, Auger proposed to convert the basic relationships of the housing modules into a mathematical form, taking into account factors such

The simple drawing on this viewing unit illustrates the sub-picture facility on the 4100 Graphic Display and Light Pen system. Any visual element can be drawn by the designer, stored by the computer and "parked' at the bottom of the screen until required. The light pen is used to place a sub-picture in the required position in the final design and the computer will automatically record the spa- tial relationship, ie, upper left-hand window. If required, the completed picture as shown here may also be stored as a sub-picture. Sub-picturing is economical in the use of core storage for defining the displayed pic. ture and it also speeds up the drawing process, especially when comonly used elements are repeated

田田田

田田

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Far East BUILDER, April 1969