Forward history: Practice beyond BIM

Architectural practice can be expanded through a fine control of the toolset.

The history of the architectural discipline is punctuated with many moments of progress – leaps forward that forever change how buildings are constructed, or alter how they are conceived. Architecture typically absorbs the effects of these historical ripples, and practice moves forward in an altered state, adjusting to such shifts and integrating them over decades. The development of projective representation during the Renaissance marks one such significant shift that altered both technique and disciplinary status, elevating the act of building design from the vocational to the theoretical.

Five hundred years later, the early modern conception of simultaneous, interconnected space that led to the making of the “free plan” catapulted the intellectual project of architecture further forward. Today, the architectural profession still operates largely under the guise of the modernist spatial project, with vast segments of our work relying on nineteenth-century assembly techniques and guided by documentation which, as a contract standard, is still based on fifteenth-century conventions of representation: section, plan and elevation. However, due to the integration of new practice tools and methods, this is quickly evolving.

The end of the twentieth century saw hand-drafting replaced with vector-based 2-D packages like AutoCAD and Vectorworks, while in the schools and high-end offices, complex geometry was explored in 3-D modellers like Form-Z and 3D Studio. While the age of computing in architecture has begun to mature, the industry has coalesced around a core platform for productivity: BIM, or the Building Information Model, typified by familiar names like Revit and ArchiCAD, with less familiar but important players like Digital Project (developed by Gehry Technologies).

With one digital model, an entire team of designers, consultants, builders, and even the project owner/end-user can actively participate in real-time development, verification, value engineering, bidding, project management, clash detection and facilities management via an up-to-date virtual model and dataset that represents an entire building down to the smallest of components.

From that file, a conventional set of 2-D documents can be readily produced. If fully parametric (that is to say, if each element is hierarchically related), the power and control to accurately adjust, test and update design variables of a project are greater still. Virtual prototyping of the project can yield substantial benefits for the client and contractor, and in general lead to savings approaching 10 percent in terms of cost and site time.1 But profits aside, what else is at stake? Is BIM the next example of an innovation created within our disciplinary boundaries that could again shift the historical trajectory of the architectural project in a fundamental way?

111 Eagle Street by Cox Rayner Architects is an example of BIM efficiency. The building was developed with Arup through parametric modelling based on seed germination theory.

111 Eagle Street by Cox Rayner Architects is an example of BIM efficiency. The building was developed with Arup through parametric modelling based on seed germination theory.

One such potential lies in the procurement process. In parallel to the rise of computing software, we have seen the progressive marginalization of the architect in project delivery: risk is distributed and profit and influence allowed to flow to others. Recently this trend has begun to reverse, and digital tools are a significant reason why. As noted by Professor Branko Kolarevic, co-author of Manufacturing Material Effects: Rethinking Design and Making in Architecture, how we as designers recast methods of process and delivery is critical in this effort.

The American Institute of Architects, for example, has created a contractual model called Integrated Project Delivery, or IPD. This is similar to the “alliance” model that has rarely been implemented in Australia (the most notable examples are the National Museum of Australia in Canberra and Hamer Hall in Melbourne, both designed by Ashton Raggatt McDougall). What IPD aims to create is an environment of trust and, necessarily, shared risk between the three main stakeholders of the IPD contract: the owner, architect and builder. Contrary to the dominant construction model of “design-build” that places the contractor as the central agent in the process, under IPD or alliance, all parties work collaboratively, connected by shared risk/reward incentives. BIM is the tool that allows IPD to work, and ultimately it is the dynamic relationship between parties that BIM facilitates which is most revolutionary. In moving back to the centre of the process, architecture can benefit from the design prowess of our digitally enabled present and future.

The other potential for the integrated age lies in the number of practices, both small and large, that have begun to establish precedents for new practice paradigms. One key path towards occupying a new centrality in the design-to-implementation process is demonstrated in the work of SHoP Architects in New York City. SHoP relies on a variety of software tools, and more importantly, employs staff versatile in their ability to design spaces and to write the code required to enable sophisticated computational schemes. In the design of the new sixty-three-thousand-square-metre Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, SHoP not only functioned as the design architect, but was engaged by the facade contractor to deliver the cut files and sequencing information for a twelve-thousand-piece latticework of unique weathering steel panels that envelop the building mass. To enable this process, a CATIA model was used by SHoP to develop the 3-D geometry of the latticework, with embedded scripts that generated the 2-D cut files and specific data related to fixing points, lighting integration, panel folds and tabs. As summarized by Chris Sharples, partner at SHoP, “‘model’ may be an outdated term to describe the process used to develop and fabricate the latticework of Barclays Center. Whereas a model suggests a single file or set of files containing 3-D or 4-D geometry and metadata, the latticework of Barclays Center was contained in an interrelated series of systems involving combinations of parametric geometry, templates and scripts. The process itself is the model.”2

At the Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture’s (ACADIA) 2011 conference, it was interesting to note that many delegates presented their research in terms of workflow diagrams, articulating various road maps that seek to intervene in a normative process or invent new approaches to design and implementation. Very few presenters referred to BIM as a cornerstone of their work, instead developing research agendas that require much more customized and specialized programming knowledge in the service of designer-controlled fabrication robotics, for example, or in the development of self-assembling materials. If ACADIA is a glimpse into where the industry might be in ten more years’ time, we may have even moved beyond BIM to the degree that designers are literally building projects themselves with code, a robot and nanoparticles.

The Fibrous House prototype by Kokkugia is a working model that shows how an architect 
can design both structure and material through a complex assemblage.

The Fibrous House prototype by Kokkugia is a working model that shows how an architect can design both structure and material through a complex assemblage.

A practice based locally that exemplifies this look into the future is Kokkugia, a small firm based in Melbourne and New York and led by RMIT University academic and practitioner Roland Snooks. Kokkugia’s work makes an important distinction about the hierarchical nature of parametric and BIM platforms — although they set up dynamic relationships between design elements, these platforms are limited by a linear, top-down conception of formation. In contrast, Snooks and his collaborators take a novel position with respect to how architects engage software. Rather than simply use it, they often write their own; particularly, developing scripts that tailor the functionality of platforms such as Rhinoceros, Processing and Maya to suit specific needs. This is approaching a concept of generative “ground-up” formation of the designed object that is localized, non-linear and evolutionary. While such approaches can be applied at the scale of a building, the most compelling aspect of Kokkugia’s production is in the design of material itself. Its current work is focused upon what Snooks terms “fibrous assemblages”3 – composite systems of interlinking cast and tensile components that are formed with additive robotic-assisted assembly to realize complex structural geometries. The suggestion posited by this work – that the architect can design not only the object, the process and the software, but also the actual substance from which architecture is made – is simultaneously a radical and logical outgrowth of our digital era.

Many external pressures, ranging from population growth to climate change to resource scarcity, are likely to shape the nature of architectural practice in the years ahead, and parallel to this context, architecture has a body of innovative tools, research and practice precedents developing within its disciplinary framework. Indeed, the practice of architecture will change due to these influences. The question, however, is whether the historically slow and reactive way architecture is typically reshaped due to external pressures is enough to keep pace, or whether, through the use of new tools, techniques and procedures developed within our disciplinary boundaries, the architect will radically depart from antiquated conventions of practice to emerge once again as the central player in the built environment; someone who can nurture and manifest profits that are materially, experientially and culturally rewarding.

From the Architecture Australia (Sep/Oct 2012) Dossier on “Integrated Design.”

1 Australian Institute of Architects et al.,“BIM in Australia 2010” (report on BIM/IPD Forums), 2010.
2 Chris Sharples, “Barclays Center,” in J. Johnson, J. Taron, V. Parlac and B. Kolarevic (eds), Project Catalog of the 31st Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, 2011.
3 Roland Snooks, “Detail as procedural information,” Architecture Australia, vol 101 no 1, Jan/Feb 2012, 106

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Published online: 5 Apr 2013
Words: Chris Knapp

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Architecture Australia, September 2012

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