Robinson Hall in Harvard Yard was the home of the Graduate School of Design before the construction of Gund Hall. It now houses the History Department. (Model and rendering by the BUILDER program, 1982).

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Summary: From 1978-1984 I worked at the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. I worked on a number of projects including:
1. Computer-aided architectural design. I wrote a computer-aided architectural design program called BUILDER. I also collaborated with GSD students and several architects (including Paul Stevenson Oles, FAIA, who was a Loeb Fellow at the GSD in 1982; Ed Popko; and Dan Schodek) to use my program (BUILDER) for structural design, landscape architecture, rendering and visualization of various designs and spaces.
   Read the BUILDER Manual and Documentation.
2. I worked on the ODYSSEY geographic information system, and wrote the CALYPSO module of ODYSSEY. Here is a picture of some of the Odyssey Team.
3. I worked on a table-driven language system called GLIB / LINGUIST in collaboration with Nick Chrisman and Jim Dougenik. GLIB was the language module for BUILDER, all the ODYSSEY packages, and for many other programs at the Lab.
   Read the GLIB Manual and Documentation.

I have scanned in some of the Manuals, Software Documentation, Technical Reports, and Design Exhibitions from 1978-1984, , and you can read them here.

Aside: You might also like to Read the EIGHT Manual and Documentation, and Jonathan Rees' extensions to EIGHT (more here). Jonathan and I went to graduate school together and he is an old friend; Jonathan worked as a postdoc in my robotics lab from 1991-1992. See our paper, Program Mobile Robots in Scheme, which has some debt to GLIB. This paper appeared in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Nice, France (May, 1992), pp. 2681-2688. Many people do not realize that the title of this paper is in the imperative mode. It should be read as: Program Mobile Robots in Scheme! Note the exclamation point.

In 2004, Nick Chrisman asked me for materials for a retrospective exhibit being arranged at Cornell and Harvard. I'm grateful to my assistant Chanda and Reed Detar for digitizing these slides & images from my files. This page contains thumbnails that link to images about the BUILDER project. Most of these images are from a talk I gave at the Harvard Computer Graphics Conference (Session 17, Architectural Practice; July 27, 1982 3:45 PM) and some are from an exhibition at the GSD:

A Familiar Space in Two Dimensions (Piper Auditorium CAD Study), Bruce Donald and Paul Stevenson Oles, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (1982).

The small images are moderate-sized jpegs. The large images can be about 1MB. The large images are a superset of the small images.

Nick wrote a book about the history of the Lab, called Charting the Unknown. You can read an excerpt about it here, and it can be ordered from ESRI Press, ISBN: 1-58948-118-6.

----Bruce Donald

Selected Images in a Small Format

All Images, in a Large Format

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