You can design

Many architects don’t see BIM as a helpful tool, and they are probably right. At least considering their self-image. I believe it is less a question of BIM and more a question of the architect’s self-image and their interpretation of the job:

I learned at university that the architect is the conductor that makes buildings happen — who navigates the conflict of interest between technology, art, and sociology. I learned what good architecture should look like, and I learned a «method» to get to good architecture. This «method» involves long hours, creative chaos, sketches, building models, and much time spent designing. All by itself not wrong, but it’s not a method for consistently doing good designs. It’s creative, hit or miss. The fundamental picture behind it is the misunderstood genius artist who struggles with the world and creates something beautiful out of this struggle. It’s perfectly pictured in Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead.

Moving from what is good architecture to how to do it

When I started to work, I learned.

• Many other trades are necessary to make good architecture and a good building for the client.
• I need people, communication, and management skills to be a conductor.
• The client is the person who finally decides what good architecture is. The hit-and-miss approach to architectural design is very wasteful — regarding the own resources and in terms of everybody else. In short, I need to learn to sell my service and my idea.

When I realized this, I started my journey to learn the «how» to find alternative, better approaches. Many architects I know never started this journey, and they are copying what they see on the job from more experienced architects. But they never stop and try to learn from other industries.

So what happens when an architect remakes the self-image and starts to have another (more fitting) approach to being the conductor? The conductor is not the best violin player, the best oboe player. The conductor is the person who brings all these different players together for a meaningful pleasurable concert. To do this successfully, the conductor must understand the music and the audience.

Let’s transfer this analogy to architecture. To make meaningful buildings, the architect needs to understand the client. Either by having an instinctual feeling for what the client wants — the same that conductors often do. Or by learning to understand the client’s needs better. To learn to ask the right questions and run inexpensive experiments to learn more. The first approach with the instinctual feeling is again more hit-and-run. For a concert, it does not matter. The worst thing is that the audience leaves the concert hall and is unsatisfied. For a building design, it’s more wasteful. We talk about an investment for many years with a huge ecological footprint. Therefore I think the hit-or-miss approach is not a responsible one.

Three main jobs of an architect

So let’s look at the three main jobs an architect has:

1. The architect is the conductor and the engineering team develops good concepts for the client.
2. To do so, the architect needs to understand the client’s needs and needs to enable the client to make (good) decisions.
3. The architect is the servant of the construction site. Because no architect can build by themselves. They need construction companies to do so!

Back to BIM. As the architect with the usual «method» of the creative struggle, doing BIM is just another annoying thing he needs to do. Moreover, using the tools is often not very intuitive. Therefore BIM is just a pain in the ass and does not help the architect do better designs.

How this self-image influences the use of BIM

Being the architect who wants to develop good concepts by understanding the client and enabling the client’s decisions is another story. BIM can help in the following:

• Most client’s don’t understand the architect’s language of plans. (And most architect’s don’t understand the client’s language either). So the plan is often not the right medium to transport the information. With a model, there are different ways of transporting the information — just a view mouse clicks away. E.g. the spacial quality can be transported with a walkthrough or some pictures. Client requirement can be transported with simplified plans/models. But instead of having to draw them manually, they can be generated automatically from the model and the data. (By the way, I’m a firm believer in plans, they are very useful for experts to understand a building on a conceptual level).
• This brings us to the aspect of storing and transporting requirement information. Often requirements are «trapped» in documents. The transfer of these requirements to design happens at the head of the designer. Now the model can be the storage container to save this requirement information and to make it worthwhile for the design process. E.g., storing the room requirements in a linked database and, when needed, visualizing or checking these requirements against the proposed design. The Onuma system is one of the BIM solutions on the market supporting this approach.
• The Client usually wants the optimal solution, and often they want hard facts to make the decisions. So far, the hard facts like costs are only generated after long planning times at the end of a project phase. Often too late to change the approach in a meaningful way. With BIM, you can set up processes to do these simulations automatically and provide hard facts for cost, life cycle costs, comfort, and energy usage. See my other posts and videos to learn more about simulations.

Now the big BUTs:

• No software delivers these results out of the box. You need to set up and adapt your personal processes accordingly. It’s like the master builder of the renaissance. To realize their ideas, they needed to design their machines first. Once set up, the system can be reused and optimized for all your projects. The path to get there is first to want it, secondly, do it and thirdly, improve it!
• The usual BIM modeling tools are very complicated and were developed to produce BIMs/plans with a scale of 1:50 in mind. From my point of view, a scale of 1:50 is some middle ground born in a none digital age. It’s detailed enough to build traditionally but not too detailed to become unreadable. Like every compromise, it’s probably not the best solution for the new digital age. To enable quick modeling to help the client decide is too much work. To model detailed for smooth production it’s too cumbersome. This effort in modeling takes out the pleasure of designing.
• The tools are not good at managing data. So you spend quite some time modeling and entering data manually. To manage data, there are better tools. You can get already far with Excel; having some more database skills won’t hurt.

A design system to enable client’s decisions

Let me sketch a possible system for you:

1. The client usually cares about the space and how the space is used and connected. So this is what should be modeled. The standard BIM tools model the walls and the space results out of it. But by working like this, you need more clicks and more time. Moreover, changing becomes cumbersome. That’s what the title picture shows. Modeling eleven versus four elements for a simple design, the more complex it becomes, the worse the ratio gets! You can get the same plan by either modeling all the walls or placing the spaces in a black shape.
2. By documenting the spacial client requirement in a database (excel), it’s easy to manage this information visually, enable discussions about the requirements and enable better decisions by the client.
3. Running simulations based on these rudimentary models is very simple when using the abstractBIM service that automatically calculates the building elements like walls, slabs, and roofs… Based on this abstractBIM, you can do thermal, comfort, and different cost simulations in the tools of your choice. The model quality will always be the same. Therefore it’s simple to automate these simulation processes.

Based on these simple, quickly modeled BIM it’s possible to get almost all critical client decisions before we need to model with a lot of work from detailing. As mentioned before, when using the BIM tools as intended, they encourage you to start going into (unnecessary) details very quickly — hence losing flexibility and wasting time when changing or developing alternatives.

A design system to serve the construction company

Once the design stabilizes and the client is satisfied with the functional layout and the construction solutions, we can proceed to the following two steps:

1. Getting the building permit as early as possible to reduce risks for the client. Often slightly enhanced rudimentary plans are enough for this.
2. Bringing the design into reality by finding the right companies to build it. And by providing them with the right information to do so.

Avoiding constructability issues and coordinating trades is where BIM excels. I’m talking about clash detection and coordination. The usual architect’s BIM tools like Revit and Archicad are not so great at producing detailed construction-ready models. The exception is solutions coming from the steal, timber industry (Tekla, Cad works), as well as general purpose modelers like Rhino and SketchUp. These tools can model production read. But these are not the usual tools an architect would use in later design phases!

Conclusion

Looking at the available tools, I see that first, we shape the tools, and then the tools shape us (or our thinking). Because most architects don’t question the tools, their workflows, and most importantly, their self-image, they can’t benefit from BIM in the creative design phases:

1. They approach them traditionally and expect the tool to deliver the plans. They don’t question their methodology.
2. They don’t hack the tools for quick modeling, data management, and simulations to support the solution-finding process with the client.
3. They shy away from the effort to produce mistake-free constructible models. Partly it’s effort. Partly, it’s a skillset, and mostly, it’s not seeing the necessity because it has worked so far.

The moment you start to change the way to approach architecture by putting the client’s needs first and hacking the tools to suit your explorative working style, BIM can be a great tool in your belt.

Of course, for a good design, we need much more than only a BIM tool, but I hope I could show you that there are ways of making BIM work for you in a design process — early and late stages. What do you think? Did you start hacking your processes?

—

When you like this content, please share the newsletter with like-minded people. Thank you!

—

---

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bim-buster-you-cant-design-good-architecture-simon-dilhas