Technology Evolution

With the advent of computer technology, design disciplines have seen a tremendous change in the way work is produced. For the first 50 years of the Department’s existence, everything was done by hand; written and drawn with pencil, ink, and paper. In the mid-sixties, that slowly began to change.

Several graduate students opted to use a computer program in a land planning project. Specifically, they wrote a road location computer program that generated a ‘least ecological impact’ road alignment. This modest student effort generated a major controversy, pitting the “intuitive” designers like Eckbo and Robert Royston (Royston was teaching the studio class) and the more design-oriented students against the planning-oriented students and faculty resulting in a very rich intellectual experience.

Donald Appleyard was hired in 1967 and became an advocate for using computer technology in planning and design and began to develop simulation tools that led to the Environmental Simulation Lab. Shortly thereafter, the term “Geographic Information System” (GIS) was coined and applied to regional planning, spurring interest in its usefulness for landscape architecture. Robert Twiss and colleagues modeled environmental data, such as soil type, slope, and vegetation, to produce a land-use suitability map of the Lake Tahoe basin. This model, a very early GIS, was run from stacks of computer cards on an IBM 360 mainframe computer. This led to the development of REGIS (Research Program in Environmental Planning and Geographic Information Systems), which was founded to develop GIS tools and apply them in environmental planning, management, research and teaching.