AN ARCHITECTURAL PERSPECTIVIST GOES DIGITAL

Located in San Francisco, Robert Frank has been an architectural illustrator since 1986. He is president emeritus of the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists and teaches digital imaging at the San Francisco Academy of Art College.

Frank's specialty is value (shaded) drawings. Working in traditional manual media, it is difficult to "add" color to a value drawing and get saturated or pure color. The shading of the base drawing limits the potential saturation of the applied color.

VISUALIZING HOW BUILDINGS BREATHE

The constant movement of air through the spaces of a building affects its thermal environment and, thus, its energy performance, yet this invisible "breathing" has been difficult to understand or predict using traditional tools.

Now, computer-based air flow modeling techniques are more available to architects to help visualize and fine-tune their designs to improve natural ventilation and related energy performance.

GRAPHISOFT PRIZE 2000

"...The Ministry of Truth was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 meters into the air."

Anyone reading this chilling description of the building that housed the government's propaganda machine in George Orwell's novel 1984 will instantly form a mental picture of the edifice. Now some designers have gone beyond this imagining and actually built computer models of it.

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