[jacquesm]

What has happened is parametric designs. That is the big game changer, the number of people working on this stuff has dropped, and the flexibility of the designs has gone up. But on the overall price of a building it never made much difference because the drafting never was a huge factor in cost.

I worked for a big dutch architect (as a freelancer) right around the time that this transition was happening, they made spaceframes, structure made of knots and pipes with threaded holes in their ends, the obvious advantage was that if you knew the dimensions of the building you could just generate a BOM and start cutting, which before then was a lot of very time consuming computation. Never before did I get confronted so visibly with the effects that my work had on others, and it was a lesson that I never forgot. Essentially I was instrumental in making a whole bunch of draftsmen redundant and they were helping me to bring that about.

The company still exists, they still make spaceframes and I highly doubt you'll even find a drafting pencil or a RotRing pen anywhere on the premises. I still have Makowski's books on my shelf 35 years later.