Architosh talks to Francois Levy about Small-Firm BIM

Earlier this year architect and educator Francois Levy, AIA, came out with his new book “BIM in Small-Scale Sustainable Design,” published by Wiley Publications. We were excited to hear from him, as Francois has been an encouraging reader of our online publication for many many years and it is always exciting to learn about what our many readers are up to.

We were even more excited when we learned that the new BIM book was focused on BIM usage in small-scale practice. The reason for that is simple. Books on BIM today, and a large array of case studies on transitioning to BIM, are by-and-large centered around large-scale practice. Hospitals, university laboratories, museums and other big projects have undoubtedly moved ahead in BIM (Building Information Modeling) due to both the enormous potential in gained efficiencies and also the investment muscle and resources that typically back such endeavors.

Large-scale practice can, simply put, afford workflow experimentation and process innovation change more easily than small-scale practice. You can section off a small segment of a large practice and say, “we’re not going to worry about profit on this job too much and see what happens.” However, that doesn’t mean–as we learn from Levy in this interview–that small-scale practice should hold back on BIM adoption. If anything small-scale practice may have even more reasons to be enticed by BIM process change. And that is just one of the messages we hear in both the book and the interview.

While our interview delves into the subject of the book, we talk more broadly about BIM in the interview. Levy is an innovative thinker and we would be remiss to not engage him on thoughts about BIM beyond even the book. He shares with us his views on the challenges of BIM adoption in small-scale practice, in addition to covering such topics as generation and firm culture challenges.

[Editor’s note: Architosh’s 2010 BIM Survey Report covers such topics thoroughly in a well-researched and interview-based fielded study. For readers interested in firm cultural challenges in BIM adoption our ISV version of our report contains indepth analysis and extensive firm interviews that shed light on this very subject. You can find this report publication available here.]

The Book

BIM In Small-Scale Sustainable Design is a book that begins by reviewing the emergence of Building Information Modeling (BIM). The first chapter lays out the links between BIM and sustainable design in general and like all the chapters ends with a case study.

Chapter two devotes itself entirely to a discussion of BIM software, as well as complementary BIM applications. Francois Levy is honest in his book about his personal preferences but does a solid job of noting the strengths and weaknesses of nearly all BIM software packages.

The heart and soul of this book however are the chapters 3-10 which focus on sustainable design. Chapter 11 is focused on collaboration. There is a very solid bibliography and set of references in the back as well. Without further ado, let’s begin the discussion.

The Interview

Anthony Frausto-Robledo (AFR): What is your professional background? I know you teach and I know you are a practicing architect as well, can you tell us about yourself?

Francois Levy (FL):  Sure, I am first and foremost an architect…a practitioner. Since I live and work in Austin, which is fairly progressive towards environmental and sustainability concerns, those concerns have always been on the radar for me. So the nature of my practice is such that I am always inclined to design with an eye to climate indexing. Particularly with the hot summers and occasional cold winters out here…Austin is a climate that demands respect.

So I came to Austin in the late 80’s to get my master’s degree in architecture and then, like many people that come to Austin, ended up staying. In 2006 I went back to get a master’s degree in architectural engineering with a focus on sustainability. Along the way for the past ten or twelve years I’ve been teaching off and on. Currently I am not teaching.

AFR: When you do teach, what areas do you teach in?

FL: Mostly in what we might call environmental controls and building technology, but I also have taught in digital practice tools like CAD, 3D and BIM.

AFR: Okay, so what brought about the idea to do this particular book?

FL:  For most of my career I’ve worked in smaller architectural practices, primarily doing residential work but not always. I had a stint in a larger firm earlier in my career and have done work outside of residential building types. And I also have had a strong interest in technology tools and I’ve become a fairly accomplished Vectorworks user and I am, for instance, the Austin area Vectorworks User Group organizer.

What I’ve noticed is that most small firms are under-utilizing the technology that is available to them. Which of course is completely understandable because as technology gets more sophisticated and complex it can become more daunting and challenging for firms to keep up with.

AFR:  How so in your mind?

FL:  If you follow the discussion boards like the AIA TAP boards for example–which are widely cross-referenced–you will see that there is a widely divergent view about the benefits of BIM adoption and the strengths of just staying the course with 2D electronic drafting. So part of my motivation with this book is to help small firms get beyond the poor utilization issue and to start seriously evaluating and adopting BIM…because there is much that can be gained by doing so.

AFR: So what kinds of pro arguments are you hearing about BIM in small-scale practice by those using it? Or what does it seem people are interested in the most about BIM?

FL:  Most talk centers around using BIM for productively advances in working drawings. Once you are using BIM, especially as a sole practitioner, the hard line between design and production is quite blurry. We as architects like to design up to the very last minute. But furthermore from my engineering and environmental training I know that there are clear benefits to sustainability that can be gained by implementing BIM into the process early on.

AFR: Can you elaborate on that?

Sustainability Advantages

FL: Many architects for example will pay attention to energy performance when it is time to submit for permitting. They’ll run ResCheck or ComCheck and then find out they need to add more insulation or have a higher performing window system or whatnot. At this point you are making changes so late in the design process that the improvements you can make towards energy performance are pretty minimal.

You aren’t going to reconfigure major formal changes to a building or re-site the building when you are 95 percent through working drawings. That’s just not going to happen. But from my experience with BIM, for all of its benefits as a production environment, it also had the potential to help designers design better performing buildings earlier in the process by helping them test and validate qualitative design assumptions. So rather than just throw up a set of windows for compositional reasons–which is nevertheless important–why not actually be able to test out questions like “do I have the appropriate amount of glass on this elevation or not?”

So the book is oriented towards moving the mindset about BIM from the big office with big projects to the smaller office with smaller projects and also about rethinking the values of BIM in the earlier stages of the design process.

AFR: That was a very lucid explanation and I am sure our readers will appreciate that. I would agree with you. I want to drill down into this further because this is what makes your book unique.

FL: Okay.

AFR: This book to my knowledge is one of the first books about BIM that addresses specifically the small-firm office. And you have been explaining the rational about that. But I am wondering if you can add a little bit more color to the discussion, about this book, for small firms…how it may or may not differ from the information out there about BIM which tends to be for larger firms.

FL: Sure. Deep thinkers about BIM will point to interoperability as being one of the cornerstone’s of BIM’s power and importance. And for this point I’ll just shorthand that by alluding to bigBIM, littleBIM. And I think that is fine; and it is certainly true that even small firms need to collaborate. But frankly, while it is important, it is not as high a priority to a small firm as it is to a large firm.

And for example, if you go the AIA Convention and you walk past one of the BIM software providers you will typically see BIM employed for large projects. And for small firm owners like myself seeing that you can say to yourself, “well, I’m never going to do an airport, so I can just walk on by and go check out the Pella Window guys or something.”

So the areas where the BIM discussion is happening just misses the small firm entirely. That’s one issue that I address in my BIM book. Another that this book addresses that to my knowledge none of the others address is the fact that the smaller the project the more susceptible to climate it is. So once again the more critical BIM is to help architects in smaller practices design to climate.

AFR: Right and you summarize this in the opening pages of your book. So I want the reader to fully understand what you are saying so I’m going to ask this somewhat rhetorical question. Are you saying that smaller buildings are more important to climate then larger ones?

FL: No, what I am saying is that if you are designing a 2 million square foot building the most important loads on energy consumption are going to be generated by people and equipment–they will have a very large impact on the energy load footprint of the structure. Whereas if you are doing a 2000 square foot structure how your building performs is largely going to be determined by its relationship to climate.

AFR: Right. In your book you say that smaller structures are “skin-load dominated” rather than “internally-load dominated” and therefore their morphology is more impacted by climate. So in general, the smaller the building the more susceptible it is to the impact of climate on the building?

FL: Correct.

AFR: Okay. So your book definitely gets into a range of topics such as passive cooling, passive heating, solar geometry and daylighting and onsite energy systems–all topics you might find in an environmental building design book not a book about BIM adoption. Is that one of the unique features of your book, not only is it addressing BIM and the small practice but it is addressing the issue of scale and its relation to climate and energy consumption?

FL: That is exactly right and I don’t know of any books that do that. And of course someone who is deeply interested and versed in sustainability may find this book lacking in detailed knowledge of sustainability; likewise someone who is deeply versed in BIM topics may find this book lacking in BIM technical issues. But this book is both. Which again goes back to the importance of small buildings to climate; those small buildings constitute about 20 percent of our national energy footprint.

AFR: Some might say that’s a collective 20 percent.

FL: It is. As an individual architect practicing on small buildings I’m going to have a token impact on our nation’s national energy footprint, but as a representative of a large swath of our industry–architects in small practice doing residential and small commercial–we can have a massive impact on our energy consumption.

AFR: It will take breaking down a certain mentality. The result of which is that as a collective small-firm practices can have a massive impact on our national energy footprint.

FL: Absolutely. That is perhaps the larger and better reason for the adoption of BIM in the small building practice.

AFR: Then why not legislate this, why not require it in law? Big BIM is doing BIM for many other reasons and a good by-product is greener design. But there are so many small firms and this group is lagging. This just means lost energy potential. What are your thoughts on this?

FL: How would you enforce a BIM requirement? I just don’t see it the next five years.

Why small BIM Now

AFR:  As we know the vast majority of architects are working in small practices and we have been going through this BIM revolution now for about ten years–but especially the past five–but a question comes up and I’m going to play devil’s advocate and ask: why jump to BIM now? What is the urgency for small-scale practice today? What do you say to that?

FL: Any moment is a good moment to re-evaluate how important our contribution is to society and how we practice. Maybe ten years ago there would have been some political rhetoric that would have made the climate argument challenging but we are here now and that rhetoric has lost its punch. It’s by now been solidly established that what we do as a society has an [environmental] impact.

I think that the large project, larger firm BIM trend is inevitably having an impact on our whole industry. And strictly from a professional practice viewpoint, I would like to see that we avoid this schism emerging between large firms and small firms due to BIM. Architects, especially early in their careers, tend to bounce around a fair bit between firms. If there is going to be this technical BIM barrier between large and small firm practice then that is going to have an impact and ultimately affect the architecture industry.

AFR: Your last point is very well taken and addresses cultural issues in firms around BIM, something we spoke about extensively in our 2010 BIM Report.

Okay, let’s talk about the bigBIM-smallBIM issue a bit more relative to the tools. Now you do a good job in your book describing the various BIM software tools for architects. But how would you characterize them, based on your research and knowledge, in relation to the bigBIM-littleBIM issue? Who’s doing the better job at addressing smallBIM issues?

FL: Well, I’d like to rephrase that as designBIM versus collaborativeBIM.

AFR: Okay…

FL: From my experience, products like Vectorworks and ArchiCAD–particulary Vectorworks. And of course  you are aware from my book my bias as a practitioner on Vectorworks is noted. So I want to make that clear right now. These products, and in my case particularly Vectorworks, give me opportunities to free-form model–like I would with SketchUp but on steroids with powerful NURBS–and at the same time benefit me down the line with standard BIM tools for interoperability and IFC. I also can produce great looking drawings too.

Products like ArchiCAD, with its server-side solutions. That’s a real strength for the collaborativeBIM market. And Graphisoft is a leader there, clearly. But it is only a matter of time before everyone in the market goes there.

AFR: Yes, it’s only a matter of time. Can’t you say that about everyone’s BIM?

FL: Perhaps. And then Revit of course has its own strength and weaknesses like the others. What I try to focus on is addressing the needs that firms have and finding the right BIM product for them. Otherwise it’s like trying to tell everyone that they should drive the same kind of car.

The focus should be on workflow. Each office has its preferred workflow based on what types of building types they do, what market they are in, and how they as individuals uniquely offer architectural services for those markets.

AFR: So the bigBIM-littleBIM kinda correlates to the collaborativeBIM versus designBIM–that’s how you see it?

FL: Yeah, that’s how I see it.

AFR: Right, and correct me if I am wrong but you are not really characterizing any particular BIM software as being any more one or the other but that particular firms and what they do and how big or small they are determines a particular set of needs. So the big firm will likely have a heavier emphasis on “collaboration” than say the smaller firm. But that doesn’t make them any less of a “design-firm” or design oriented practice.

FL: Yes that’s all true. And what I’m saying is that it is not that the small firm doesn’t need to collaborate or it’s not important to do so but rather generally speaking they will collaborate with a smaller number of stakeholders than the larger practice.

In my experience, for instance, you may not have many opportunities to do BIM collaboration with structural engineers serving the smaller building market. They may still be doing things the way they have since the early 90’s. That affects your opportunities for BIM collaboration. In the larger building markets, it has often been the contractors who have initiated BIM for benefits like clash detection to save on construction costs and reduce errors. They have a significant incentive and that has contributed to the adoption of BIM.

Similarly, clients and owners of large buildings have a vested interest on the facility side of managing their data in the BIM. For the most part very few small building owners, particularly in residential, have any knowledge much less interest in keeping BIM data.

BIM Simplification and Assistive Design (BIM+AD)

AFR: Okay let’s shift gears again a bit. You mentioned some things about the small practice boards, the TAP boards for instance where people are saying 2D is just fine why BIM? Okay, so what would you say–and this is not just about people being stubborn–about what needs to happen both on the tool side and the process side to affectively make a dramatic shift to BIM happen for the small practice?

Why don’t you start with the tools side. What is keeping the tools back from making a small practice from adopting BIM?

FL:  If I could answer that question, I could hire myself off to a software vendor and make a million dollars. Right?

AFR: (laughs..) sure.

FL: The answer is time. Eventually energy codes will become so stringent that it will be ineffective to design to comply with those codes by just eyeballing how design reacts to energy requirements. Number two, there is just a cultural shift from one generation to the next and I don’t know how old you are but I’m old enough to have experienced the first shift from paper to CAD.

Right now the next generation is moving forward with the adoption with BIM. In the past the most technically adept folks in practice used to be the people with the most amount of experience, but today this is split between two generations each one knowing a lot more, generally, about their side of the field. There are people coming into the firm today who know a lot more about design tools than the firm principals and yet those people are also the least experienced about how to put a building together. At the end of the day we are talking about a very complex system–a building.

I’m not sure that the BIM tools are just one day going to wake up and be so simple that everyone in the profession, every generation, will just suddenly be able to adopt BIM and work with these powerful but complex tools.

AFR: I’m not sure that will happen either. At least with the existing players. That’s not how software tends to evolve historically.

FL:  Now SketchUp is a great example and story.  Prior to SketchUp, 3D was much less ubiquitous because of the demands of mastering the arcane commands of sophisticated 3D modeling software and 3D CAD. But SketchUp developers were very disciplined and kept things so simple that 3D became accessible. Can BIM developers do this? I’m not sure. There is only so much simplification possible. At the end of the day these systems are quite sophisticated and complex. Perhaps…

AFR: Okay, I want to interject right there, if you don’t mind? Because what has come to mind–you just said something very important–which is, “there is only so much simplification possible.” And that simplification–when we talk about simplification–what we are trying to do is talk about the technologically vertically challenged, experienced people in the industry. So perhaps the older folks? And by the way I’m 46 years of age. The younger people are getting a lot more training on these systems because that is where Architecture school is.

So what we are saying is that there is only so far we can go with BIM tools to address the simplification of the older folks, but what can the tools do to provide assistance to the knowledge gap of the younger generation?

And so yes, I know you do need a certain amount of years to understand how real buildings go together, but these BIM tools are doing virtual buildings. Why can’t these tools do assistive design to help learning folks with the challenges of understanding systems and codes? Help the younger folks make sure they are doing things correct? Nobody is really doing this yet, by the way.

FL: Well….okay, be careful what you wish for. It almost sounds like you are going doing the slipperly slope of advocating for the software to do the designing for you.

AFR: No, that’s not what I mean. I mean having the software do ‘assistive design’, making sure for example that the stair you just created meets the general code requirements or highlighting the key code issues the designer should be aware of while she makes this new stair.

FL: Hmmm… Well, why aren’t they? Well, I would think that keeping such systems up-to-date on an annual basis while keeping your customers happy with new features is probably a lot harder than architects imagine. On the TAP boards there is a crazy request about what all CAD vendors should provide about support for older systems. It is incredibly naive. So folks need to be realistic. Software is not easy to make. Will this happen someday? Sure. Parametric tools–like the stair tools in BIMs today–do have the ability to do some of the things you are talking about.

Cultural Challenges in smallBIM Adoption

AFR: Culturally, in terms of workflow, what are some of the challenges there that you see with adopting BIM? For the small practice?

FL: Training. Training is the number one issue in terms of adoption. The cost is one issue. And you know different vendors vary. If you are transferring from an eight year old CAD program to a new BIM you are going to also figure out quickly you need new hardware to run the program so there is always hidden costs beyond the licenses too. So cost of training is the top issue preventing more adoption of BIM.

Of course the other issue is the reality that suddenly you need to retrain yourself and your team on an entirely new process. BIM is not just a new CAD program but a new workflow methodology. So that is the push back we keep seeing on the BIM discussion boards, people feel the anticipated pain in this and wonder.

AFR: What are some things that can make BIM adoption easier for the small practice?

FL: Well, if you throw the entire office at this at once then that means a hundred percent of your personnel is tied up in training and learning a new workflow. That’s tough. If you are a sole practitioner, the same is true. However, if you have one or just two people go off and figure this out and then disseminate this back into the office slowly, then the adoption can go more smoothly with less interruption to the whole firm.

AFR: Yes, you’re right. And of course we are facing a tough economy right now. And there it goes again, that irony between economy and technology. When things are bad you have the time for new learning but not the money; when you’re flat out busy you have the money but not the time. It’s a tough catch 22. Firms need to remain committed to process change and refinement consistently.

FL: Absolutely.

AFR: Thanks for speaking to me about your BIM book.

FL: You’re welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

Closing Thoughts

One of the interesting things Francois Levy said after our interview segment was that he was surprised just how difficult it was to find good case studies for this book. He admitted that he over-estimated the level of adoption in BIM in the small-scale practice. But that is part of his challenge with publishing this book: reversing the common perception that BIM is for large-scale, big building practice only.

Another interesting fact about this book is that Levy suggest that BIM is a “design environment” and not just a “design tool” as is also common. This is also different than BIM being a design process change because it is actually more aimed at another suggestion Levy makes in this book: that architects establish an interest in what he terms “climate indexed” design. That is, a building’s massing, geometry, fenestration, envelop and materials and passive strategies are specifically tailored to the building’s region and site.

Any architect doing small or medium scaled projects who is also vested in sustainable design but is not yet doing BIM will enjoy this book’s overall focus. For those who are doing BIM now but not yet highly focused on sustainable design, this book will provide even more delight in reviewing the way BIM models can be utilized for sustainable design.

Architect Francois Levy, AIA’s, book can be found at various websites for purchase. Including Wiley, Amazon and others. We hope you enjoyed this extensive interview feature and would love to hear from you. If you have read the book, tell us what you think or share your thoughts on our Facebook wall.