PhD dissertation: Deblackboxing the Architect’s Toolbox: Open-Source Toolmaking for Architects Beyond Proprietary Software and Closed File Formats

Architecture has become dependent on proprietary software and closed file formats. This dependence has intensified "black boxing": tools that can be  understood by their inputs and outputs, but whose internal processes are  inaccessible to users. The result is a quiet transfer of agency—from the  architect to the software vendor—precisely at the moment digital tools have  become central to how buildings are represented, taught, and produced.

The problem is most acute in education. Schools of architecture typically  teach students to operate industry-standard software, not to understand how  those tools are assembled or how they might be studied, adapted, or remade. Students graduate fluent in interfaces but unable to inspect or modify the  instruments that shape their design decisions. Vendor-driven curricula,  licensing costs, and closed formats make open tools, open standards, and  shared practices harder to encounter, teach, or sustain.

The dissertation confronts a specific pedagogical gap: how can an  accredited architecture program cultivate genuine toolmaking literacy—enough  grounding in computation that digital tools become intelligible as  constructed systems with specific assumptions and constraints—without turning  architects into computer scientists or replacing one ideological workflow  with another? Solving this required designing and iterating a teachable  method, not just arguing for one. The challenge was to prove that architects,  given the right pedagogy, can move from passive users to active toolmakers  who regain critical control over the design process.

The dissertation resolves the challenge through deblackboxing: the critical act  of making digital tools inspectable and modifiable, achieved by synthesizing  open-source development with programming pedagogy—treating programming not as  a technical utility but as architectural literacy.

The primary intervention is a core-curriculum course, designed and iterated  at Carleton University's accredited school of architecture. Rather than  teaching students to operate a single platform, it teaches them how tools are  assembled and how they can be studied, adapted, and remade. Lectures  introduce the histories and logics of contemporary representation tools (CAD,  BIM, GIS, computer graphics, web-based 3D)