"Viewed against the backdrop of epochal changes registered in industrial technology, architectural technology, since late modernism, seems to have ceased evolving. The development of new technologies, methods and materials, unrelated to existing ones, gives architects little resource to historical techniques and representations. Despite the heterogeneity of current movements and theories, architectural discourse remains principally concerned with the ideology of all things retinal. Technology was long ago served from the autonomy of architectural art. An abundance of practical and intellectual constructs have been erected around identical buildings techniques, producing in mainstream architectural culture and unbroken tectonic and representational tradition three decades old. Once again we see the institution of architecture dealing with arguably the most important spatial technology (the computer) in only a visual way.  Some applications of computer technology have radically redefined how one sees and conceptualizes the marking of space. Until recently, general use of the computer has been relagated to the world of the "virtual", as well as that analysis. However, recent advances in electronics and computer processing found in computer numerically controlled technologies now allow us to move directly from a computer model/computer drawing to built form. This technology not only eliminates the distance between "virtual" architectural hypotheses and the physical test of construction, but also forces us to examine our roles as architects in a condition allowing greater potential input the processing of building construction."

William Massie (1997)