Frank Gehry hates paper. Not paper itself -- just its use in architecture. His company, Gehry Technologies, has spent the last several decades developing a digital system for sharing and working on architectural plans and diagrams and other types of building information modeling, and now he's trying to share it across the industry, with the help of a new collaboration with cloud-based storage service Box.
As modeling tools have gotten increasingly complex -- in architecture and otherwise -- they've become data-intense, and file storage and management has grown correspondingly difficult. Gehry Technologies' GTeam software is the Pritzker Prize-winning architect's attempt to streamline and manage access to different types of design files and documents, from blueprints to certificates to CAD. Box, meanwhile, is a cloud-content management and storage service with an increasing presence in the architectural, engineering, and construction industries. Gehry believes Box's infrastructure will allow the GTeam service to reach beyond his own buildings to other architects, helping them make the same transition he's done with his company.
"My dream is to do buildings paperless. And it can be done," says Gehry, noting that currently, certain restrictions prevent eliminating paper entirely. "I discovered that, using the computer, we had more information, which kept us in control and allowed us to protect the owner from a lot of waste in the process."
Though he's not exactly a technophile, Gehry's company built its own digital tool, called Digital Project, capable of modeling the intricate shapes the architect is known for. But GTeam, which has been publicly available for less than a year, can also incorporate other files, from Rhino to Autocad, and some other architects -- Gehry mentions his friends Zaha Hadid and David Childs -- are already using it.
"Box gets us the scale that we're looking for, outside of the Frank Gehry ecosystem," says Laurence Sotsky, Gehry Technologies' senior vice president. "And we see from our side, with the type of penetration that Box has been able to achieve in this space, the ability for us to really make an impact on skylines in the world."
Gehry and his team experimented with and refined GTeam during the construction of the New York by Gehry, a super-tall apartment building completed in 2011. They weren't able to build it completely paperless, but sharing digital plans brought the architects in closer sync with the engineers, avoiding clashing systems -- for example, where a structural beam is scheduled for the same location as a plumbing pipe. This way, says Gehry, they were able to cut back drastically on the number of change orders (expensive directives to alter the plans, which Gehry says can amount to 15 percent of the construction cost). Typically, these alterations can gather into the hundreds or thousands of orders. In the case of the digitally designed New York, there were eight.
"Because nobody could see them in the two dimensional world, by taking them into 3-D, you have the opportunity to avoid these clashes," says Gehry. "Those amount to considerable savings in the construction process."
Like Gehry's most famous buildings -- the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles -- the New York features unique pieces of bent steel throughout the facade, and Gehry cites GTeam as crucial to fitting all that steel together and integrating it into the building's bay windows.
"It allows for demystifying complex shapes, so that it gives more leeway, more freedom to the architect to design," he says. "That's the extra goodie from a design standpoint that was added to the design, which we were able to do within a rational budget."
Box is used across industries, from business to medical, but they're trying to get into different verticals, says CEO Aaron Levie, and architecture is one of them.
"It’s a category that's really well suited to the cloud when you think about the kind of scale of data that exists in a lot of these projects," he says. "You know, some of them range to terabytes of information."
Not only are the files complex, but records of who has edited, and when, and how add another level that Box helps sort out. And, points out Levie, because the files are so big, they've instituted a feature where users can see the renderings before downloading them, to make sure they're looking at the right ones.
"I think when you can bring these tools to the masses, it really opens up innovation in an incredible way," says Levie.
Gehry concurs. "I’ve dedicated a whole pile of my life -- time and effort -- on this topic," he says, because most of the architecture around the world he hardly considers architecture. "It’s just buildings. And I have this hope that if we have the right tools out there that people with talent can prevail, and can show how you can build wonderful buildings for the same cost."
