Ask my boss, Diego Matho, who loves this kind of thing and already mentioned this program to me. I believe our school even has a couple of licenses, although I've never used it. Diego? Are you out there?
Right now, "generative modeling" is all the rage in academic architecture and with students. All kinds of CAD and modeling programs have instituted features like this, which were originally only available (as far as I know) through hand-coding, then through an expensive accessory to Bentley Microstation called "Generative Components." But now the concepts are trickling down everywhere...I particularly like the plugin for Rhino3D that allows this, called "Grasshopper", which is free and scripts with a node-based visual programming language.
I think the whole fad is symptomatic of a kind of serious semantic problem in architecture...that there is no meaning there that can actually be objectivelywritten. What does a work of architecture mean? Not what-is-it-for, but what-does-it-mean. If you can come up with a meaning for a work, are you very sure that someone else would automatically come up with same meaning without your help? Of course not.
Generative architecture almost answers the question, or rather confuses the issue enough to shut up a lot of people asking it. You set up a set of rules (written, one way or another, as a formula...at this point in the model, this item goes here, then this one attaches here, then this one rotates so-and-so...and then *voom!*you have this wild form for your building, be it a funky spiral skyscraper or a stadium shaped like a bird's nest. And if some challenges you on the shape, you the architect can blithely respond, "Well, that's just the way the generating formula worked out." It's not your fault that it looks like, it's the working-out of some fundamental mathematical law, a force of universal truth, blah blah blah. And what does it mean? It is the realization of a mathematical formula or method. There is more than a bit of specious disambiguation here, as the processis suddenly substituted for meaning. But it gets everyone off the hook...architects (especially young ones, besotted with form) no longer have to justify themselves or their design in the same way, and by surrendering attendant design development to a formula they save themselves all kinds of effort in having to work out or justify the consequences of their initial design idea.
(I never went beyond the "hello world" stage...)
