Architecture is in the middle of its biggest transformation since the introduction of computers. Building information modelling (BIM) is a simple enough idea: a single digital model of a building that everyone - architect, client, suppliers, builders, environmental managers - can work on. A Google Docs for buildings. But its implications could change the built environment.
"It's massive," says Benjamin Marks, who heads his eponymous architectural practice. "In the past few years, the way you design and construct a building has become markedly different." Half of all architectural practices use BIM, according to the American Institute of Architects. Marks says: "In the years to come, you'll see everyone using BIM."
Mainly, this change is a good thing. Marks used BIM on his latest project, the Green Room - a temporary restaurant on London's South Bank, built for the National Theatre. An architectural design used to start with a drawing, on computer or on paper, of a series of lines. "But with BIM instead of drawing lines, it's more assembling smart objects," Marks says.
Think of building a house in The Sims [the video game], where you select elements from a shopping list then lay them out. BIM programs such as ArchiCAD, AutoCAD and Revit know that a particular set of lines represents a window. Because the program understands the building, it's easier to make alterations and automatically update the models: no need to make a new set of drawings. "It basically obviates the need for boring repetitive tasks and it saves a lot of time." So the technology can help smaller practices compete with better-staffed big firms.
The program also enables more transparency in the design process. Since April 2016, the UK government has required any public-sector project to use the technology, to document the process. And it simplifies the environmental planning in a building, making for more sustainable projects: 39 per cent of those working in British construction (architects, engineers and surveyors) think it will lead to a 50 per cent reduction in carbon emissions, according to the Royal Institute of British Architects' National Building Specification.
BIM will also enable some brand new and far out approaches. Startups such as Pair (formerly Visidraft) and Augment were quick to adapt BIM for mobile devices and augmented reality. Some architecture firms have been using BIM with full-blown virtual reality, to walk through their buildings. IVR Nation is a London-based startup offering tailored versions to firms that don't; Seattle's Visual Vocal is developing this as a general platform, with a beta in summer 2016, launched by architecture firm NBBJ.
At the 2016 Venice Biennale, in the US Pavilion, UCLA professor Greg Lynn used BIM to redesign the abandoned Packard Plant in Detroit, then showed it off on Microsoft's HoloLens. Designers can enter their buildings before they're even built and get a sense of their space, something that was impossible with old-fashioned computer-aided design (CAD) - surely a good thing.
The downside of BIM is only a possibility - for now, at least. CAD, introduced in the 80s, led to some new styles of architecture: notably the parametricism of Zaha Hadid, which exaggerated the quirks of algorithmic design to very creative and human ends. Could BIM have its own style?
The technology is more about process than product. But even that could lead to a different sort of building. "BIM will only enable you to build what the construction industry enables you to build," Marks says. "Because it's inherently linked into products that are available." That shortening of imaginative horizon might be exacerbated by the technology itself. "You have to play by its rules. It irons out problems, but it might also iron out happy accidents as well," Marks concludes.
So, at the lower end of the market, BIM might curtail creativity. "It might open up the gap between so-called commercial practices and so-called design-led practices," Marks says. And the people within them, too: Marks thinks we could see a distinction among architects, between "artists" and "technicians".
BIM is a youngish technology. We're still shaping the tool, but we should take care: because it will shape the cities we live in.
Tom Cheshire is technology correspondent for Sky News and author of The Explorer Gene.
The WIRED World in 2017is WIRED's fifth annual trends briefing, predicting what's coming next in the worlds of technology, science and design
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
