41 VISUAL PROGRAMMING IN ARCHITECTURE Should Architects be trained as programmers? STEFAN BOEYKENS AND HERMAN NEUCKERMANS K.U.Leuven Dept. of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning (Belgium) keywords: programming, CAAD, design process, interface, curriculum OVERVIEW Most commercial CAAD applications have online communities of end users, through blogs, discussion forums and learning portals. On many occasions, questions lead to the conclusion that the sofware can only provide the desired functionality using scripting or programming, to fll in the gaps of the sofware feature set. However, more than once, people suggest that architects are not programmers and that they should not be responsible for adding this functio- nality. Similarly, when guiding students through some of their technical design studio problems, a comparable reaction is noticed. Tis is especially remarka- ble, considering the fact that these students had prior programming courses, as part of their Bachelor of Architecture curriculum. Tere are many diferent advantages of embedding programming skills into the curriculum of the architect. Burry (1997) witnessed the infuence of pro- gramming on the design studio work. While the examples from the article might be dated, the relation between programming and design studio assignments is still non-existent in many schools, nowadays. A notable counter-example can be read in (Fricker et al, 2008), describing the use of Processing (Reas and Fry 2007) as programming platform within the architectural courses. Programming should be part of the main architectural skills, albeit not necessarily in the sense of writing code. Te design brief for a building project is commonly described as a series of constraints, parameters and a listing of the desired functionality. While the translation of these constraints into a design usually occurs mentally, there are benefts to transfer this process more explicitly, through the application of scripts or parametric systems, directly in the early T. Tidafi and T. Dorta (eds) Joining Languages, Cultures and Visions: CAADFutures 2009 © PUM, 2009