It actually summarizes the history rather well. The foresight from Gehry was really taking parametrics from the Mechanical-CAD world and applying them to Architectural CAD whilst everyone else was still emulating the drawing board virtually (and unfortunately many still do), the hierarchical nature of the relationships you get from parametric modelers, and having to abstract out your physical objects, surely made the jump to storing structured information a lot more natural.

The real power in practice comes from the information interoperability between stakeholders, which it didn't really touch on, but enough to highlight it's biggest roadblock, contracts. For information into how to create a productive contractual environment you can look into Integrated Project Delivery arrangements.

"(I don't know a ton about this stuff, as I switched from an architecture degree to CS after a year once I realized tools like Grasshopper existed. I decided I'd rather learn to program and apply it to architecture then learn architecture and try to pick up some programming)"

Similar to you I started out in Architecture but spent around 3 years in that program (at three separate universities) before finding a rather unique degree that combines both (Architectural Computing). I did my final project on Parametric Structures that were also "intelligent" in Bentley Generative components.

Thanks for the information on Grasshopper. I use other software for procedural graphic works, so I was wondering--does Grasshopper do any kind of structural engineering support work, or is it mainly for auditioning procedurally-generated shapes?

(BTW my CS advisor flipped his top every time he heard someone say they were studying CS to learn programming. I left CS after hearing that lecture a few times. :))

We use GH (Grasshopper) to generate fully attributed and restrained models for FEA packages and then pipe them over real time to visualize (in the FEA pacakage) and run solvers. It allows us to create complex and very large FEA models quickly and iteratively to solve some tricky engineering problems.

There are structural solutions on top of GH like Karamba [0] and interesting physics engines like Kangaroo [1].

[0]: http://www.karamba3d.com/ [1]: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/kangaroo

Isn't post-parametric architecture all the rage these days (at least in all of the architecture talks I've been to, I know next to nothing about the field)?