CityEngine was originally designed and developed by Pascal Mueller from Switzerland. He invented a breakthrough programmatic modeling technology during his doctoral study in the computer vision laboratory at ETH Zurich. This technology was mainly used for three-dimensional architectural design, which also laid a solid foundation for CityEngine. In 2001, he published a research article "Procedural Modeling of Cities" in SIGGRAPH. This also meant CityEngine had been officially out of the lab.