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.
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