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My Architectural Past

At the urging of my family, I went to school to study architecture - at the 5 year BS of Arch program in the Architecture department of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo, California.

While there, however, I continued to: develop computer graphic software, teach a grad Math course on APL, and lecture on computer graphics. My senior thesis was Computer Graphics in Architectural Applications.

As you might have guessed, my true love was computer graphics...

I also worked part time as a programmer for the university (porting engineering applications), worked part time as an architectural designer/draftsman, and ran a freelance business doing architectural photography and model-building for the design firms in the area.

After finishing the 5 year program, I stayed in San Luis Obispo for about a year designing some local residential and light commercial buildings. While I enjoyed the creative expression of architectural design, and the rewarding experience of seeing my projects built, I was inexorably drawn back to designing/developing software.

Leveraging off of my experience in architecture, I migrated to CAD/CAE operations, then to instruction and support, and finally to software development, where I began developing CAD applications and utilities for various architectural/engineering/GIS firms and companies like Data General, McDonnell Douglas and DEC.

Although my career has returned to its software roots, I do miss the excitement and atmosphere of architectural design. I hope to return to architecture one day - in terms of a retirement hobby, funding my own projects.

The following is a sampling of a few of the projects that I've worked on. They comprise no major achievements, but they do give you a flavor of the process involved in architectural design.

- Examine a project from conceptual sketches to presentation models to construction.

- Conceptual sketches of a rustic resort project.

- Class projects.

For more information on this web page, email bfree@graphcomp.com.