Perspectives on the 2014 Architosh BEST of SHOW awards at AIA National

Introduction

Last year senior associate editor Pete Evans AIA wrote an excellent article regarding the framework from which the Architosh BEST of SHOW awards were going to adjudge innovation and progress in information technologies for architectural practice. That ‘framework’ remains largely relevant this year. However, there are certain aspects of that framework that deserve further application and clarity.

Pete ended that article from last year with a quote from Sir Ken Robinson, imminent educational visionary who said this about tools: “Tools themselves are always neutral (relying on a person’s intentions). It’s all about the possibilities people see in them and the opportunities the tools provide for imaginative work.”

It is fitting that we ended with that quote last year and begin with it this year. The intentions of architects the meaning of design intent come into sharp focus this year. I should point out however—before this article goes much further—that, unfortunately due to personal commitments, my friend and colleague Pete Evans was not able to attend AIA this year. I have tackled these honors, bravely, solo.

Design Intent and the Intentions of Architects

Let’s begin by asking: “what are the intentions of architects…by and large?” And can we answer that question partially by what the profession tends to focus praise on?

Traditionally both the profession and society have focused praise on design innovation or innovation within ‘architectural expression’, that last term pulled from the pages of academia and late 20th century ‘contexturalism’ which, like other periods, focuses attention on matters of what buildings look like. It has been customary to heap this praise on a single individual. This has been the norm; award programs, book editors and writers and architectural critics continue to reinforce the prevailing pattern.

Yet there is a new direction challenging this pattern and it is causing serious riffs here and there within the profession. We saw it two years ago with the Pritzker Prize controversy over Denise Scott Brown which called for the honor, given to Robert Venturi (Pritzker Prize Laureate for 2012), to be shared equally with his wife and long time creative partner.

There is a stirring of support to recognize that the architectural profession is, after all, a team sport!

The continued maintenance of the word “I” in the word “team”, where it doesn’t possess a spot to sit, is itself a long-term threat to the entire profession. It’s a threat because is denies right from the opening gate that any young architect should be thinking properly of her craft as a well-coordinated creative effort by many hands. Under these shifting conditions the intentions of architects should begin to pluralize away from the view of star-chitecture concerns.

It’s also a threat because it challenges the required plurality of inputs that should be considered in modern building design. These inputs are manifesting because they’re responding to larger global concerns, like global warming and the scarcity of resources. But it’s not just that—architects today need more expertise and it’s no longer reasonable for society to expect a single individual to possess that much skill and knowledge. However, it is very reasonable for an entire architecture firm, of even modest size, to do so.

Today’s leading firms are succeeding because they get this. Their acknowledgement of wider inputs into successful architectural design is shifting their priorities. In turn their staff make-up has a more relevant complexion. Their public-facing side may still focus attention on the firm’s single owner, owners or star talent, but their private-facing side reveals a deeper truth and that story is being told in the changing landscape of architectural tools and technology.

Design Intent and Design Performance

In the year that has passed since Denver performance-based design has begun to really ramp up. Last year we identified three key lessons shaping the architectural IT landscape:

• Lesson One — Social and Democratization of IT
• Lesson Two — Computation Power and the Cloud
• Lesson Three — Creativity and the Contemplative Pace

Design performance sits at the center of the second lesson. But it also plays a role in its interaction with creativity. Within the Architosh BEST of SHOW honors there will be a continued focus on these three broad-brush areas because we believe so firmly in their impact on the future of the profession.

Over the next few years we anticipate an acceleration in cloud-based computational power and inputs into design practice, further mobility and richer capacity with mobile devices, and continued social forces and their impact on architectural design in the form of big data, the role of sensors and lasers and a social push for greater freedom over who owns and controls the data and in what form. That was a mouthful. But’s it’s happening!

Today the term design intent has waning relevancy. In the Autodesk Innovation Forum in Chicago at AIA Phil Bernstein of Autodesk argued that the profession is going to lead its way back to the era of the master builder, with less separation between constructor (builder) and architect. With architects acquiring 3D printers, constructors building parts via CNC machines and similar equipment, and with big manufacturers able to provide custom manufacturing all three entities are getting linked across the BIM and PLM (product life-cycle) pipeline using essentially similar or the same technology.

The Maker Movement furthers intensification in the profession and in young professionals, in particular, in actually making things in the way of digital to 3D prototyping.  Who is to say that architects in the near future don’t actually start manufacturing parts for the buildings they actually design—lending a degree of customization, originality and problem solving beyond their adjacent peers? The 4D and 5D technologies of BIM increasingly link the architect to the actual building process, while the virtual building concept pioneered by Graphisoft evolves to the level of simulation and optimization. What does “design intent” now mean in the era of simulated building performance, simulated occupancy, and virtualized construction?

Arguing for Insight

In the Autodesk Innovation Forum Phil Bernstein presented a chart that demonstrated progress from the various eras of the architect’s documentation (on x-axis) moving from the era of documentation, to era of BIM, to the emerging era of context. If the era of BIM was about optimization the new era of context is about integration of simulations and validation, noted Bernstein.

On the y-axis Bernstein’s chart shows increasing “insight” afforded to the architect and the design-build team in the era of context. For the value of context (and situation) to bear full value to simulation and validation in building design two key things must come true: social data must be reliable and accessible and the sources of this data must be publicly trusted. Insight can certainly go up when architects harness more data, including social data streams, but if this data is not honestly presented then these insights may bear false results in urban and architectural design.

This leads us back to the beginning. Yes, as Sir Ken Robinson noted, tools themselves tend to be always neutral. But tools armed with data and social data, in the era of context, can suddenly become not neutral when they are filled with skewed or biased data. And this says nothing about the inner issue of will architects honestly work with data?

Is this okay? Will society continue to entrust the profession’s judgements, aesthetic and data-scientific, in the era of context? These are questions that remain to be worked out.

next page: Reviewing the Winners

Reviewing the Winners

On the Desktop Winner(s)

This year’s first winner in this category won over others for its sheer virtuosity in programming ambition and execution, which is something we noted last year wasn’t necessary going to be the focus of this program. Despite this, certain innovations are worth noting and Vectoroworks Architect 2014‘s new Vectorworks Graphics Module bodes extremely well for this leading BIM and CAD tool. Already, Vectorworks utilizes the world’s leading geometry modeling kernel in Siemens’ Parasolid. Interestingly, the decision to home-grow their own advanced OpenGL rendering engine with aspects that are similar to both HOOPS (a rival rendering API technology) and the well regarded Unity Game Engine was an interesting turn of events.

The second honor in Autodesk Dynamo with particular emphasis on version 0.7 alpha acknowledges many of the latest important trends, including social in its open-sourced ambitions. It was particularly valuable to see that this latest alpha version contains Autodesk’s own modeling geometry engine (ASM) and is even more capable of direct modeling and that the stand-alone version doesn’t require Revit. In fact, Dynamo 0.7.x has nearly full access to the ASM geometry kernel, the same library that powers Inventor, Fusion, AutoCAD and other Autodesk products. Openness may drive further appeal for those utilizing Generative Components or Grasshopper. Computation-based modeling doesn’t just afford architects with more aesthetic possibilities, such tools also lay the basis for performance based design.

On the Mobile Winner(s)

BIMx Docs is a beautifully executed 3D application on mobile that links the experience of a 3D virtual building, a world unto itself, with the visual world of 2D drawings. And it does it with an engaging animated experience that invites an iterative exploration of both the BIM model and the drawings that are generated from it. Architects can now bring their ArchiCAD BIM projects into the field complete with the drawings and the BIM model. In Japan GRAPHISOFT noted where BIMx Docs will go in the future with respect to data and its BIMcloud technology. BIMx Docs has a very bright future.

And so does Autodesk FormIt with its continued refinement of an app that enables conceptual architectural modeling directly on map-based sites with local climate station data that can help power early stage building performance based design investigation. Front-ending analytics is an extremely important growth vector affecting the left side of the effort bubble in the famous MacLeamy Curve.  As tablet computers gain more power in hardware as well as tap the power of cloud-based computing resources, many possibilities begin to take shape.

On the BIM Winner(s)

With a particular focus on where technology investment is happening relative to the MacLeamy Curve, up-front analysis naturally makes the most sense as this is the stage where the architect can have the biggest impact at the lowest cost. For years architects have designed structures and then engineers ran calculations to verify performance. If the performance didn’t meet design intent goals the architect would redesign and repeat the process. This produced waste.

This technology is now entering the architect’s workflow early—even in more rudimentary form—where architects can make more informed early decisions. This leads to earlier insight and to architects having the ability to design higher performing buildings faster and with more control over the relationships within a structure. Leading the charge is Sefaira’s web and plugin technology and specifically its SketchUp plugin. Sefaira puts computational heavy analysis up front in the design process directly into an iterative design tool in Trimble’s SketchUp modeler. Architects can evaluate energy implications and lighting within every push-pull of the model at every turn. This is, in fact, the future of design.

Graphisoft’s BIMcloud is a superior piece of technology implementation of its patented Delta Server™ technology. The Hungarian BIM pioneer is arguably very far ahead of the entire field in one particular area of BIM—real-time collaborative team technology that works across oceans and continents all over typical Internet connections. ArchiCAD 18 with BIMcloud furthers this ability by adding real-time scalability to massive BIM projects by harnessing the infinite power of the cloud.  Both BIM winners this year are squarely exemplify the computational power of the cloud.

On the Innovation Winner(s)

So what is the most promising and most innovative new information technology (IT) at the AIA this year? What’s going to have a really big impact moving forward, conceptually and as an implementation of that concept?

Sefaira’s tools and technology are clearly leading the charge in “front-ending analytics”, a term that popped up at the Autodesk Innovation Forum at AIA this year. It’s a very good term and describes well the push to the left on the MacLeamy Curve where analytics computation—of the type typically done by engineers and sometimes scientists—is being delivered in a form to architects via easy to use software tools for design.  What’s chiefly valuable up front is insight on energy performance and daylighting. Both are major factors in the sustainability equation. At AIA National in Chicago Sefaira was the coolest toolset delivering value in this area.

Another important factor in sustainability is the weight of the building itself. Like aircraft design where “lighter” is the new king, buildings that use lighter materials—especially those materials that are hidden inside the building itself—contribute a good to the environment in reduced carbon emissions in the transportation of those materials from the point of manufacturer to the construction site and all points in between (think staging and warehousing). This is where Altair Corporation’s technology is coming into play. Noted last year in Denver for its first-time entry at AIA National, the company was in attendance this year touting its many technologies. solidThinking Inspire 2014 is an interesting tool that can enable architects to work at both the building and the building product level to tackle the problem of weight reduction in efficient structural design.

In the case of Inspire 2014, the honor is more directed at the “promising” aspect of the technology. When we talk about front-ending analytics in the design process, Altair’s technology has tremendous potential in AEC. For the average Joe architect, this tech may not apply, like Sefaira’s tools. At least not just yet. But for the special projects category of creative structures solidThinking Inspire 2014 has much to offer.

Closing Comments

These 2014 Architosh BEST of SHOW at AIA National honors recognize tools that are exemplifying the cutting edge of the IT landscape in AEC. While there were many other interesting software tools—like the areas of photo-realistic rendering—these types of tools, mostly, are on sustaining innovation trajectories that have been well defined for years. Most of the tools cited above are on innovation trajectories that are so new the field isn’t sure which ones are disruptive or not. And which ones will leave an indelible mark on the nature of the profession and its history. Will architects see the possibilities in these tools and embrace them for the betterment of society and their profession? Or will the stick with the status quo, limiting their potential for engagement and change?