A structured analysis of CAAD education

After more than four decades of its beginnings, Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) has already reached a level of maturity in both the education and the profession. There is an ever-growing amount of literature on the subject; however, relatively few studies have taken a systematic approach to analyze CAAD education. Moreover, design institutions often view CAAD merely as a technical issue ignoring socio-cultural and theoretical aspects. In order to alleviate these problems, this paper presents a structured analysis of CAAD education based on Prof. Necdet Teymur's theory of architectural education. Prof. Teymur claims that the components of architectural education should be studied in terms of objectives (why), contents (what), methodology (how) and management (who) along with four different knowledge and disciplinary levels (viewpoints); namely, sociological, ideological, epistemological, and pedagogical. In this paper, current issues of CAAD education are addressed within this framework and several proposals are presented.