School spends $1m on design tools

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

The University of Auckland's School of Architecture has caught up with the times by incorporating information technology into a $1 million upgrade of its design studios.

Associate head Brian Taggart said the school had provided computers before but they were locked away in classroom-like computer laboratories.

"It went back to the thinking of the 1980s when computers were regarded as something privileged which were operated by people in white coats in air-conditioned rooms.

"The shift now is to put them where the design and the teaching of architecture actually goes on."

Roughly half of the $1 million was spent on refurbishing and furnishing the four-level studios, and the rest on new hardware and software. A further $500,000 a year has been set aside for future upgrades, as all hardware and software is written off after three years.

The school has bought 50 mid-range PCs from Penrose-based PB Technology and 33 high-end Dell Precision 340s. The Dell PCs run on 1.8GHz Pentium 4 chips and each comes equipped with 1 gigabyte of memory, a 19-inch monitor and a 40-gigabyte hard disk.

The software available to students includes nine computer aided design (CAD) and graphics programs including AutoCAD Architectural DeskTop with Pacifica extensions for local building industry standard elements, a version of 3D StudioMAX for architects, and SoftImage.

Taggart said the main applications were running on Windows XP but the school also owned 36 iMac computers, which were used for applications such as word processing.

The new PC purchases brought the number of computers in the department to 160, a ratio of up to one PC to two students. The refurbishment had also given students 24-hour access to the facilities.

Taggart said anyone who wanted to be an architect now had to be computer-literate. Although the profession had been relatively slow to embrace technology, CAD software had made an impact on architectural practices.

"I'd say it's swung around in the past five years. Traditionally a practice wouldn't be expecting any financial value from a new recruit for a year to 18 months. Now they have got to earn their money from day one, and graduates with the right computer skills can start off at the sharp end, actually designing buildings."