From CAD to Search, Rebuild the Industrial Chain of Architecture by IT

After the introduction of CAD technology in the 80s of the 20th century, the Information Technology (IT) is influencing the upper stream and the down stream of the architectural industry at an unprecedented speed, in which the architectural design is regarded as the core section. This paper will retrospect and summarize the process of the IT’s restructuring the architectural design and the whole industrial chain, including the former two stages which have happened and the third stage which is emerging. Furthermore, this paper will give some effective suggestions on the development direction of the third stage, discuss how it is being put into practice, and present the conceptions of the object database of all industries, which takes the algorithm for the Object Rank as its essence and its application mode of searching in order to solve the issues such as evaluation and sequence of searching involved with all the stakeholders, enterprises and products in the domain of architecture and facilitate users to make the best choice to meet their needs quickly and effectively when facing mass data. In addition, this methodology can also be applied for other similar industries.