Object Oriented CAD p.II

Now that I have some experience with the software under my belt it is time to start asking questions of it.

What might the consequences of this object orientation be? What sorts of biases might be encoded in this way of working?

Already I have stated, Revit and BIM are production oriented softwares.  The object oriented method is definitely more suited towards rather standardised methods of construction, and so it propogates industry standard techniques.

Economic Repercussions:  Global Mindset

The online block repository would privilege those manufacturers and providers who can both produce their own blocks - the process is likely time and training intensive - and get them on the server.  Likely the server is for companies with national or international reach and so that there would be a tendency for  mom and pop operations would start to get eliminated from the project.

On the other hand, as many of the techniques in the industry are standardised, standard blocks actually might not hurt them once it comes time to tender a project as everyone does windows essentially the same way.

Earlier (but Less Decisive) Decisions:  Categories = Politics

Also encoded in the method is a sort of definitiveness to the design.  In a standard design process, the space between walls or floors can be left blank until it is figured out later on exactly what the composition might be.  Many of these questions are asked earlier in the project with Revit.  It is, of course, possible to use generic walls and floor types, but there is an increased impetus for these decisions to be made earlier.

Luckily, these decisions are not definitive.  One other consequence of the object type method is that it is very easy to go back and change decisions later on, because by changing an object type all its instances can be updated throughout the project.  Want to use bamboo flooring instead of hardwood now?  No problem.

There is an aspect of conservatism to this method, still.  Even in the way that the program asks you to decide  whether something is a wall or a floor as soon as it is drawn, the program consistently reinforces typical elemental categories and methods throughout the process.  Personally, I've had too much of the uncertainty cherished by deconstructive thinkers and don't really think that this type of politicisation of language is useful, but there are many who do.  This aspect of the program would probably be a big problem for them.

Materialistic Bias:  You are What you Eat

In Revit (at least in the form it comes "out of the box") the criteria that can be attached to an object are primarily performative:  cost, weight, fire rating etc..  If these are the criteria consistently placed in front of a designer, one can imagine that focus will increasingly be on these parameters.  It's a case of daily culture for, as the saying goes, "You are what you eat".  Somehow tweaking the available parameters to assess the qualitative goals of the client or designer seems to be currently difficult to do.

In my opinion this materialistic bias is not a bad one for architects.  While performance based architecture is slowly becoming the philosophy du jour in many academic circles, it is often underemphasized by many in the profession (academy included) and its media.  Architects are often seen as stylists;  specialists in aesthetic, meaning and the orchestration of feeling in a building project.  Performance is the language spoken by many of the other key stakeholders in the construction project, and so it is to our advantage to become well versed in both its language and delivery.

Anti-Monolithic Design / At Peace with Pieces

By forcing design to be assembly specific from the outset, the program moves away from the sort of monolithic design that could be considered a consequence of typical CAD / 3D modelling programs.  Everything is a material assembly now instead of some white plastic shape.  This could potentially translate into an aesthetic of pieces instead of plastic, monolithic form.  While OOCAD has been closely aligned with many of the expressionist projects of the late 20th c. (Gehry used CATIA, another solid modeller to produce their deformed shapes), if one takes a Modernist approach to interpreting the tool / medium this is not necessarily it's "essential" use.  The model is built up of a series of pieces or parts, not deformed from a single lump of clay.  It's "essence" is an assemblage of multiple pieces.  Thus one could imagine an architecture of multiple different expressed pieces being its product.

Object Oriented CAD

One of the defining features of Revit (and I would assume many other BIM softwares) is that it constructs the project out of a series of individually considered and attributed objects, rather than as a series of simple geometric lines and planes.  For those familiar with AutoCAD blocks, it is as if the entire project were created entirely of dynamic blocks.

What's so special about that?

It the object oriented approach, the objects are themselves subsets of data, or information containers.  In  OOCAD one can imagine the object properties available in an AutoCAD object such as a line containing more information than its geometric and formatting options.  What is both important and powerful about this approach is that it becomes possible to register and eventually understand a project as more than its geometry.  As well, changes to the types can be used to update large numbers of object instances throughout the project quickly and accurately.

A window in the project is created from the "window-variable-standard" basic object type (as seen on the top right) scaled to fit its opening and located in the project through the properties in the right panel.  The object types properties (center) can be used to modify the type's relative dimensions (in this case frame depth, window location etc.) as well as model, manufacturer and cost information.

As well, performance information about individual materials and assemblies can be registered within the 3 dimensional model.  The model can be useful to multiple members of the project team,

Properties for a wall type include: (middle) the various layers of an assembly, their function within the assembly and the way in which they turn corners;  each of those layers is also given its own material properties (left) including a graphic appearance and engineering details.

Programming specialists will likely point out that most CAD platforms already are object oriented in their programming construction, but what I mean by this is an approach to constructing building elements out of information rich and multiple smaller pieces, which already are in tune with the expected industry product types and standards, that are then transformed to create the individual building.  This amounts in my mind to an actual break from past CAD methods which were largely drafting table operations performed on a piece of software. On a drafting table, it is not possible to create the types of information rich objects that can be done with OOCAD;  this was done instead through the system of typical project documentation of drawings, annotation and specifications.

Revit First Tutorials: Complete

Here's the fruits of the first few weeks of Revit tutorials.  I've been working through the series linked in the previous post, the Autodesk Student Expert tutorials.  It's been a good crash course as to what is possible with this program and has me feeling pretty confident about starting my own project.

I definitely need to tip my hat to the team over at Autodesk Student Experts for putting together these vary informative courses.  They've definitely kick-started my studies of what can be done with this tool, and so far I've only worked through a third of their offerings.

So far I've learned to create an orthagonal model, insert doors, windows, stairs, curtain walls, create grids, change materials, create new sheets and schedules, cameras, edit wall types... really all the basics.  I am really impressed with the program at this point, and will start posting some ruminations on the its setup and prejudices over the next while as I move forward with the first assignments.

A New BIMsness Model?

According to David Celento in his Article "Innovate or Perish" (Harvard Design Review 27), in a business as usual working relationship, BIM could actually be harmful for architects.

In the USA at least, big customers like the General Services Administration (equivalent to Canada's Public Works and Government Services) have become wise to the increases in predictability and error detection inherent in a BIM process and are now requiring at least a partial BIM model for all Federally funded buildings. "Their experience is a reduction in change orders saving the GSA up to 10% of total construction costs."p.4  So for a 10 million dollar building that is an average of 1 million dollars of savings.

While it is great that this new technology is being embraced and seen as a source of value by owners and building managers, they don't seem willing to pay extra for it, and it really does take a lot more work to produce a detailed BIM model.  As one high ranking civil servant put it:   “Architects are paid to provide buildings without errors, why should they be paid more to do this?”

Umm, maybe because our market rate fees are based on a common practice model that does not involve this extra work?

But more work and less profit are only two of the three dangers that Celento warns may come with BIM.  Because sophisticated clients are now expecting increased error reduction, when errors due occur they are even more flabbergasted and prone to placing liability on the architect.  It could make architects even more on the line for errors, omissions, and general construction site chaos.

It's not all grim though.

Celento points to the potential inherent in owning the rights to BIM models.  While in the GSA projects the client demands exclusive ownership of the final model (which I assume comes from a security paranoia perspective) if the architect were to retain ownership of the design (which I understand we do in Canada) and the contract documents (which would be the BIM file, and which are also owned by us in Canada) then one would have a half finished project ready to be deployed for another client.  If BIMming requires way more front end work, then we may as well reuse as much of that work as possible.  As well, with the parametric setup of many BIM programs, tweaking of room sizes etc. could be a fairly easy process.

I could see this being especially useful or valuable with custom homes.  With a series of base models to pick from, customers could more or less take an off the rack design, adjust it to fit their space needs, and then parametrics could be used to fit it to the site.  The construction documents could be produced more or less automatically and then bam, you have a semi-bespoke home ready for construction.  The product would be less custom than a fully tailored suit, but way more unique than standardised tract homes.  It would be the design equivalent of a Freitag bag.

link to the article (highlights are not mine):  http://workgroups.clemson.edu/AAH0503_ANIMATED_ARCH/M.Arch%20Studio%20Documents/STUDIO_Innovate%20or%20Perish.pdf

A roughly drawn site plan for use in massing.  Long rectangle is the sales floor, the medium sized one is back room storage, and the smaller ones are entry, bathrooms and office.

Playing around with the massing from the site plan.

My initial observations of the program's prejudices are that there is a tendency for things to automatically snap together, reinforcing ideas of contiguous objects.  With curved objects there seems to be less control over the creation parameters than with Rhino.  Curved object creation seems to be kind of on "autopilot".  This probably has to do with the process of continually updating geometry rather than from creating a single perfect geometry.

Day One Tutorials

First day today!

Step one to learning this program will be to block things in with the conceptual massing tools.  I`ll be going over some online tutorials to do this:

general use of the tool:
via a series of tutorials provided by Autodesk on massing and rendering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutdBBIowZA&feature=related
http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=revit2011_english

lofting capabilities for curved surfaces:
http://designreform.net/2009/03/revit-2010-new-features-conceptual-mass-make-form-lofting/

and a whole bunch more tutorials at the design reform site.  I like the look of their page, and will be looking back there for future assignments.
http://designreform.net/category/tutorials/revit-tutorials/