SURFACE EFFECTS

This is an experiment

 

That was hand written shortly after I typed the following notes on my Surface

The surface camera is struggling with hand-written text in poor light, so I have re-typed the next bit of the story.

In the earlier one-note session I had drawn a diagram.
(PIS = product information system)  (DIC = digitally informed construction)

The hand-written page was interrupted by breakfast. I got as far as this.

The Surface is becoming a useful tool for catching early morning & late night thoughts while they are fresh in memory.  I like it a lot & enjoy the ease of transferring files to & from my laptop. 

That was my desk soon after arriving at work.  The experiment is some kind of "reality TV post".  Just throwing bits and pieces of my thoughts at you in the raw form that I captured them in.  Here is the view from the back of the surface while it sits on my desk.  The orange cupboards are full of project files.  So much for the paperless office.

 

So I have this idea that the "single building model" is great for designers (drawing-ers as they say in France) but only part of the story for builders & suppliers, who can certainly use the model, but don't spend their waking hours MAKING models.  So perhaps the classic "spokes of a wheel diagram" is not the full story.  Hence my "love triangle"   I can hear some of you saying, yes put that is the traditional process, we need a new process (IPD etc etc)  Fine.  But firstly many of us are stuck with the traditional process for some years yet & we need to find ways of involving suppliers & contractors in our BIM process.  Secondly even with IPD, most of the suppliers will be outside the Integrated Design & Build team, and there will still be a subtle shift of roles when the project moves from "drawing board" to site.  Perhaps the diagram will be more of a T square than a Triangle.

So I am just thinking aloud, don't get too stressed, but perhaps we are trying too hard to shoehorn everything into the BIM box.  BIM is Building Information Modelling.  You are making a virtual 3d building with intelligence.  So you can do that with Archicad or Revit.  It's an extension of the long & extremely worthy tradition of visual thinking (drawing/design)  People talk about BIG BIM, meaning that "BIM for desiging with" starts to suggest ways that other activities in the world of construction might also change.  So you get terms like "field BIM", "5d BIM" ... (not sure why field BIM isn't called 6d BIM :-)  No problem.  People like Newforma have been a bit bolder and labelled their processes PIM (Project Information Management)   We even find people referring to "BIM authoring" to distinguish this part of the process from "BIM collaboration" or "BIM costing"   I can't help thinking, what's the difference between BIM authoring and BIM modelling ? 

Just stand back for a second.  We have drawing tools, costing tools, filing tools, programming tools.  We used to do this stuff manually, now we have digital processes that transform the way we work (like letters & email).  What we are struggling with a bit is getting everything to work nicely together.  I have been guilty of banging away at suppliers, "you need to get on the BIM train, you're out of date, why aren't there any Revit families on your website ?"  Fair enough, but perhaps we should also be listening to them.  Don't you think they have their own digital revolution going on ?  They have web sites where you can interact with their products.  Do we have web sites where you can interact with our buildings ?  Well maybe, sort of, but they tend to be glorified FTPs. Can an ironmongery supplier get on to our web site and populate our building with door hardware interactively ?

By and large we have managed to sell the idea that BIM is the catch-all phrase for where we are heading as an industry.  But it's a term that originated as a description of software for architects.  Applied to what engineers to it works fairly well.  Applied to what Quantity Surveyors do ... yeah maybe ... financial modelling perhaps.  Applied to what contractors do, document controllers do, materials suppliers & product manufacturers do ? ... not so sure.  BIM is becoming a term that is so all-encompassing and generalised that it starts to lose it's freshness & vitality.  Just look at some of the definitions out there.

Perhaps the design team should be saying "this is what we do. We called it BIM because we build an intelligent model of the building inside our computers.  We can give you access to this model.  We could even let you fiddle with some parts of it.  What tools & processes have you developed ?  How do they work ?  What do you like to call them ?  How could we imagine these systems talking to each other ? "

In short: maybe we should be listening more and shouting less.

SNEAKY FASCIST PEEK

I spent the weekend preparing for RTC Australasia.  Looking forward to spending 2 or 3 weeks in Auckland, visiting my sister, seeing the sights & attending RTC.  I will be taking two classes.  One will focus on conceptual massing, including my various pumpkin experiments.  The second will explore the use of BIM as a research tool for better understanding the way buildings work. 

I have decided to take 3 office buildings which happen to also be seminal works of architecture and use Revit models to dig deep .... I had started to model all 3 of these at one time or another and have previously posted about 2 of them.  I recently picked up a new book about Casa del Fascio and decided to start again and model it from scratch.  This was a good exercise in how far you can get in one weekend, and as usual I came up with some new ideas along the way. 

Of late my mind has been focussed on the use of BIM for concept design.  This is quite a complex building and I wanted to start by "roughing it out", sort of an analogy to the way sculptors often work.  I figured out the grids & levels, placed columns & floors, blocked out the main form with some chunky walls.

The architecture is all about expressing the concrete frame & playing games with subtle displacements and variations.  The facades can be seen as a matrix of cells.  I wanted to colour code groups of cells to create a simplified diagram of how the 4 different facades relate to each other.  It struck me that one way to do this would be to create a monster curtain wall family with 400x400 mullions spaced 4m apart and infilled with my chunky wall.

Duplicate the wall family to create types with different colours.  Select panels along vertical rows, unpin, and swap them out.  Use the empty system panel where appropriate.  This worked fine and helped me to get to grips with the underlying logic of the building.  It's a 4 sided courtyard (obvious references to the Renaissance Palazzo) but also can be read as two blocks of accommodation (left & right sides) with less substantial links at front & back.  As the modelling developed further the complexity of the form began to emerge.  The sectionalised perspective below illustrates this quite well.

You can see the games that he plays.  Reveal the frame, then hide it.  Walls of different opacities (and shininess).  The central volume has a symbolic & ceremonial importance.  Terragni believed that the Fascist party of Italy was an expression of the peoples will.  The building expresses the idea of a party born out of a revolution and the importance of transparency in its relation to the people of Como.  With the benefit of hindsight we can see that things didn't quite work out like that.  But I confess to a little admiration for the courage of Terragni's vision & hope.  There have been several popular revolutions across the middle east in recent times, one of them in a former Italian colony.  All of them are struggling to convert the fire of popular revolt into a lasting framework of peace & respect for all.  Not easy.

I didn't want to destroy my initial roughing out work, so I stumbled across an idea.  Why not use phasing to represent the different design stages ?  I created phases for Concept, Schematic & Detailed design.  The curtain wall version of the exterior facade belongs to Concept Stage & is demolished at the transition to Schematic.  New walls are built and window families developed to take us through to Detailed Design.

As a prelude to building the window families I drafted over the elevation views, making a detail group for each window type.  By copy-pasting these groups to a drafting view I could dimension them up to create an accurate guide for setting up the family geometry.

By duplicating views and assigning phases & filters appropriately I can keep simplified abstractions of my design alive while continuing to work out the finer details.  This approach certainly has widespread application to the kind of research work that I love to do.  I'm not sure how useful it will be for new design & build projects, but it's worth considering.

In just a day and a half, I have already created plans of this building that bear comparison with anything I have come across over the years.  It doesn't take long to find inaccuracies and contradictions in text-book drawings once you start to create a BIM model.  That's not really a criticism.  Most book illustrations serve their purpose of supplementing a text and giving readers images that can be used to compare the plan forms of different buildings.  But I think it is high time that we started to see histories of architecture & construction based on BIM models.  (a perfectly valid term in my view)

I need at least one more weekend to reach the level of detail that I need for my presentation in May, and this is only a sneak peek after all.  Don't want to spoil all the fun for my audience.  But as you can see, I did manage a reasonable image of at least one of the facades.  Those with sharp eyesight will notice that the window transomes don't align perfectly.  Actually the windows are very interesting, sort of a modern version of what the English would call "sash windows".  But I haven't modelled this properly yet.  Perhaps I will have different families for Schematic & Detailed Design.  Come to Auckland in May and find out !

 

What do you mean: "just" drawing?

I've been away.  Some emotional family issues, saying hello to my grandson & goodbye to my mum.  No time for blogging, but some for reading and thinking.

It has often been said that CAD was "just" drawing (lines. arcs & circles) whereas BIM takes us beyond this to the brave new world of "digital prototyping".  Well, fair enough if that's the point you want to make, but hold on a second.  What do you mean by "just" drawing ?

As a species we have been drawing for at least 30 thousand years.  Visual thinking is deeply embedded in our history and has been explored with both creativity and determination by many great minds.    Leonardo used it as a tool to explore human anatomy.  Brunelleschi and Alberti unlocked the geometric secrets of perspective almost 500 years ago. 

Orthographic projection  was formalised towards the end of the 18th Century (descriptive geometry, Gaspard Monge)  Another Frenchman is credited with inventing the blueprint in the second half of the 19th Century.  Aren't we being a little arrogant and melodramatic to imagine that BIM somehow takes us "beyond drawing" in a way that these earlier step-changes did not ?

Another thing.  For me there is no hard line between drawing and modelling.  There is a nice photo of Matisse sitting in his wheelchair surrounded by large paper offcuts.  His cut-out phase.  Was he drawing or modelling ?  Does it matter ?  In Science, models are abstractions that simplify reality so that it can be more easily studied.  But isn't that what they are in art also ?  Isn't a pencil sketch also a simplified model of reality ?

Victor Horta is known for the "irrational" curves of his art-nouveau metalwork, but there is a fascinating drawing of his that "models" the angles of sound reflection in a concert hall. 

Gerrit Reitveld is said to have slept with scissors, card & glue on his bedside table in case he woke up with an idea for a new piece of furniture.  Would that be modelling ... or sketching in carboard ?

We often boast about the speeding up of the design & build process that BIM & IPD can achieve.  I recently came across a sketch that Joseph Paxton made on blotting paper, doodling during a meeting.  He was thinking out a proposal for what later became the Crystal Palace.  It took just a month to take this sketch through construction drawings, tender & client approval.  In less than a year the building was complete.  Three years after that it had been dismantled, modified and re-erected on another site.

Personally I think that the transition to BIM is more significant than the move from hand drafting to CAD: a bigger step-change.  But it's important to keep our feet on the ground.  Perhaps if we see our work within the context of a long and fertile history of visual thinking it will help us to see beyond the BIM blinkers we sometimes wear.

Can we use BIM tools to research the world around us, as Leonardo did ?  Can we find the BIM equivalents of thumbnail sketches ?  Can we imagine a tool that bridges the gaps between Revit, Formit & Hand sketching ?  There is immense power in the hand-eye-brain feedback loop that comes into play during rapid freehand sketching & this becomes even more powerful when used in a social context.  3 or 4 people trading sketches around a table.  Can you imagine a BIM tool that is as responsive and interactive as that ?

These days, Revit is my drawing tool of choice & over the past few years I've made several attempts to use it as a "thinking tool" : another kind of sketching, a way of exploring ideas, seeing things in a fresh light.  Make a model of that idea.  What would it look like ?  Here are some:

Le corbusier's "Four Compositions" sketched out in his own wonderfully terse drawing style ... and my attempt to capture the same spirit in Revit.

Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm Library, hovering somewhere between modern & romantic classicism.  My attempt to convey this building's essence as an orthographic abstraction.

There's this thing called evo-devo which deals with the development of embryos from an evolutionary standpoint.  Lot's of fascinating stuff about Hox genes that switch things on and off at different stages in the development process.  It's a bit like saying we're all baked from the same recipe, just that the quantities and timings change.  Seemed to me this was like a parametric thing, so I made a highly abstracted generic vertebrate.  One family, four types.  Have to try doing this again one day using some of the conceptual massing tricks I've learnt since then.