| Summary: | The process of designing and building curvilinear architectures is still challenging. The use of multiple applications with distinctive design paradigms are unlikely to disappear. The interoperability used here was not only the conventional one. It was also ‘live’, in ‘real time’, with two of the applications involved opened and running simultaneously. A design workflow based on the use of form-forming applications connected via parametric programming to building information modeling, BIM, was proposed. The main objective was to facilitate designing and building curvilinear architectures and their supporting structures using simultaneously two different design paradigms. The tools needed in our research can be summarized as follows: NURBS Lofting for surface creation, contouring for modular slicing and structural axis grid definition, sweeping along axes for surface creation of the curved beams of I profile and paneling for the subdivision of curved surfaces into planar fractions. Parametric programming was used to automate sweeping along axes to generating curved I-beams and paneling to subdivide the NURBS surfaces into planar fractions. To the best of our knowledge, our major contribution resides in defining a workflow and developing new algorithms for facilitating designing NURBS surfaces and corresponding supporting structures through ‘live’ interoperability among different applications.
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