Abstract: Design review, i.e., design compliance checking, is a key step to ensure the safety, environmental protection, comfort, and compliance of a design. To address the problem of high cost, subjectivity, low efficiency and error-proneness of manual checking of building designs, intelligent design review (e.g., automated compliance checking) has been proposed and widely studied and applied. This research provides a comprehensive review of the research and application progress of intelligent design review in recent years, establishes its theoretical research framework, and systematically summarizes the development path of its application. Currently, researches are mainly focusing on the computability of drawings (or designs solutions) and computability & reasoning of regulations (or knowledge). The application of intelligent design review can be classified into three aspects: digitization, perceptual intelligence and cognitive intelligence. Among them, digitization is the foundation of the design review process, perceptual intelligence supports automatic CAD drawing recognition and model reconstruction, while cognitive intelligence makes it possible for knowledge reasoning and computation. Finally, this research points out that the intelligent design review is in the ascendant stage, and it still faces huge challenges in terms of model semantic extending, complex knowledge representation, performance-based design review and algorithm robustness & transparency.