and RuDI STouFFS TUD and NUS abstract. Flexible information exchange is critical to successful design integration, but current top-down, standards-based and model-oriented strategies impose restrictions that are contradictory to this flexibility. In this paper we present a bottom-up, user-controlled and process-oriented approach to linking design and analysis applications that is more responsive to the varied needs of designers and design teams. Drawing on research into scientific workflows, we present a framework for integration that capitalises on advances in cloud computing to connect discrete tools via flexible and distributed process networks. Adopting a services-oriented system architecture, we propose a web-based platform that enables data, semantics and models to be shared on the fly. We discuss potential challenges and opportunities for the development thereof as a flexible, visual, collaborative, scalable and open system.

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The work of the New-York based firm Massie Architecture, although as yet small in scale, lies at the cutting edge of digital architectural practice in many senses, not the least of which is the firm's extensive and direct experimentation with fabrication and assembly methods that leverage the computer's capabilities to generate and manage complex data, and to carry these data through from the design phase to the construction of a project. Examples drawn from a number of the practice's recent and current projects illustrate the variety of ways in which CAD/CAM can be put to use even on projects of modest scope, thereby attaining the goals of quality and inventiveness (both formal and technical), as well as economy. As the examples show, it is useful for the designers to have a large measure of control over the fabrication equipment and onsite logistics when undertaking such experimental work.

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The design of buildings is usually regarded as taking place before – or at latest during – their construction, yet arguably they continue to evolve via passive or active processes throughout their lifetimes, affected as they are by everything from the weather to occupant‐induced modifications to responses by environmental control systems. Another, more overt kind of change is observable at the recently built Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, where the bix installation transforms the building's primary facade in accordance with programming by invited artists. This animated field of light fixtures both literally embodies an example of ‘performative’ architecture and foreshadows a whole range of potentially creative effects achievable through in‐service alterations of a building's state, as posited by André Chaszar in this fifth instalment of AD's ‘Blurring the Lines’ series of CAD/CAM case studies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.