Evidence Based Design (EBD)... performative design in the computational design and environmental simulation fields etc have dominated architectural education over the last decade. I guess it had to come with Moore's Law and the spread of the internet.
EBD and other 'objective' approaches to architectural design are of course de rigueur in the station/infrastructure sector, as both client and consultant bodies are dominated by engineers. Even the term 'architect' is often replaced by things like 'premises engineer' :-)
While there are a lot of analytical/calculation tools like Ecotech (defunct, I know) that allow architects to get a handle on a lot of environmental metrics in order to inform their designs, and tools to demonstrate compliance with various sustainability standards, there does not seem to be much on the market to help with other 'calculation' chores that the architect would normally deal with. The structural guys have their ISM link... I guess.
So, the architect left to deal with 5th grade math problems, at worst. All the rest is been delegated to the other consultants like the environmental, services, structural etc engineers, or to the sub-contractors via a performance spec... right?
Or is it?
"Design problems...are often of such size and complexity that no single individual, or organization, or design environment is capable of effectively addressing all aspects of the design. In such situations the design problem must be addressed by a team of specialists or experts... Although many computer-aided design and engineering environments have been developed, few are capable of supporting the type of distributed, multidisciplinary team-oriented approach such problems require"
Kitzmiller, C. and Jagannathan,V . Design in a Distributed Blackboard Framework Intelligent CAD.I: Proceedings of lFlP TC/WG5. 2 Workshop on Intelligent CAD
Extracted from WS93-07-018 "Where design engineers spend/waste their time" R. A. Crabtree, N. K. Baid, M. S. Fox... which is pretty good read. A lot of the problems mentioned are being addressed by current BIM concepts like CDE, BS1192 model sharing procedures etc.
