How BIG’s influence can reframe the role of BIM in Architecture

[Editor’s note: Title graphic image: 8 House by Bjarke Ingels Group in Ørestad district of Copenhagen, Denmark. Source: Jens Lindhe, distributed under CC-By 2.0 License.]

In a field of occupation as venerated as Architecture, it may come as a surprise to find one of its newest stars speak of the role of a midwife. But that is exactly one of the powerful metaphors behind Copenhagen-headquartered architectural powerhouse BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) headed by its confident, 40-year old leader and his 11 partners.

Bjarke Ingels has quickly risen to true “starchitecture” status, being named by the Wall Street Journal in 2011 as ‘Innovator of the Year’ for architecture. And BIG is flourishing. The architecture firm has large offices in New York City and Copenhagen.

Reframing the role of the Architect

What makes BIG so special, besides its stunning and innovative work, is the extent to which its practice is actually turning Architecture on its head, and with great success. It largely does this through the innovative and often narrative creative thinking of Bjarke Ingels, and now to a growing extent its firm culture. But the projects are the firm’s thinkings’ best ambassadors.

In Ingels’ idea about architect as midwife, he explains that BIG seeks to assist both the city and society to manifest its own evolution in response to natural pressures. One of the biggest pressures is environmental change. Yet, in viewing the request on humans to be more sensible with our planet’s natural resources (our atmosphere being key) BIG turns that challenge into an active ingredient in the firm’s innovation.

In a TED Talk Ingels remarks that “sustainability has grown into this kind of neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good.” Gradually “you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life.”  Well Bjarke Ingels Group contends otherwise and has turned the responsibility of responding to the environment into one of its best attributes in generating innovative architectural solutions.

Yet, the firm clearly doesn’t function like the regular run-of-the-mill architectural practice, who will quickly go out and buy energy modeling software to start living up to the sustainability challenge. The request of designing to a specific environment, whether in the Middle East or in Sweden, gets put into this generalized and conceptual input box, where BIG collects as much information as possible before designing really begins.

Architect Jakob Andreassen, who is BIM Manager at BIG Copenhagen, says, “the way we distance ourselves from our peers, is more on an approach that insists on creating new value from existing conditions and factors we meet, with our projects, and on the site.”

The waste-to-energy plant BIG is designing in Copenhagen may be one of the firm’s best examples. BIG won the competition to design the plant in Denmark. The new plant will be one of the tallest and biggest buildings in Copenhagen, converting waste into energy to heat nearby homes. Yet, the firm didn’t simply go out and design another large energy plant.

The project will house Denmark’s first ski-slope (on the roof) addressing one of Denmark’s more interesting paradoxes—a nation of snow and good skiers but no mountains. As outlandish as the idea may seem the Amager Bakke energy plant will surely become an urban destination, deserving of its own unique signal. In that the firm—along with BIG IDEAS, the firm’s own offshoot industry lab headed by BIG partner Jakob Lange—has created a technology that will convert the normal stream of CO2 emissions into smoke rings. For every ton of CO2 a smoke ring will be released from the plant’s stack and gracefully float across the sky. The smoke rings are the brainchild of BIG and German art group Realities: United.

The result is poetic and interesting, as you can see from the video below showing an initial testing of the smoke ring technology.

01 – The Amager Bakke Energy Plant will innovate architecturally on many levels, including most importantly and interestingly, the custom technology that generates “smoke rings” that metaphorically celebrate the clean energy innovation behind the project’s goals. 

Jakob Andreassen says the technology behind the smoke rings is a “perfect example” of how BIG views the role of science and technology serving architecture. In some ways, BIG sees architecture as storytelling with all the imagination and wonder of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. In fact, in many ways it is “narrative” creativity that generates the interesting final outcomes in BIG’s architecture, not the computerized 3D software so necessary to its final realization.

This is where the story of BIG gets really interesting, from a computer software perspective.

The BIM Environment (and the ‘Bridge Firm’ Concept)

Architectural practice today is somewhere about half way through a massive migration away from an older mindset about practice that is increasingly looking like it is maladaptive to the new realities of the 21st century. To many, the crux of the matter has centered on migrating the architectural field from CAD to BIM (building information modeling).

Yet, at BIG this evolutionary step for the field of architecture is not so simple.

If BIM in architectural practice is the “destiny” of the profession, not only has the matter (of…to BIM or not to BIM?) been up to some debate but BIG’s practice itself has gotten off to a cautious start. This doesn’t mean BIG doesn’t believe in BIM—it does. But there are lessons here that need to be unfurled for the rest of the architectural profession.

Andreassen tells me that at BIG software technologies are seen primarily as “simply tools;” but as anyone with some basic knowledge of BIG’s work will tell you, the Copenhagen and New York City architecture firm is an advanced user of computer software. They are hardly software technology Luddites. And yet, they are not BIM zealots either. Jakobs Andreassen clarifies:

“Maybe technology plays a different role in our firm since it is a young firm, since the partners all grew up with technology and 3D modeling and are just as familiar with [computer] modeling as drawing with a pencil.” 

He explains, “the whole notion of BIM hasn’t really been present except for the last few years when we started to establish actual BIM platforms.” Prior to that the firm utilized what Andreassen referred to as “traditional modeling software like Rhino and AutoCAD.”

BIG’s partners and leaders are more familiar with Rhino than Mayline parallel bars and this differentiates the company from its architectural peers—like Gehry and SOM. What makes BIG’s BIM story particularly interesting is that BIG appears to be a true “bridge firm.” ¹

A “bridge firm” can be seen as one that, roughly, carries the values of traditional architectural practice forward yet has firmly established interest and expertise in the role of advanced computerization in architecture. A “bridge firm” keeps one toe (or foot) in familiar waters while it reaches with the other toe into new waters. This is different than the ‘jumping in with two feet’ approach.

“What we are trying to do is create what we call a BIM Environment,” says Andreassen. The goal of the BIM Environment at BIG is to fundamentally stay ‘open’ and agile, to be able to try out “all these new tools” as Andreassen notes. “It’s more a question of how to aid our architecture…and to think information as much as we think design.”

Information is very important to BIG, and so is the vast amount of concepts and ideas the firm generates. In a TED Talk Bjarke Ingels remarks, “We never throw anything out…we treat our office almost like an archive of architectural bio diversity. You never know when you might need it.”

next page: Revit vs ArchiCAD: No ‘Battle Royal’ Here

Revit vs ArchiCAD: No ‘Battle Royal’ Here

While the IT press may favor the “battle royal” format for sensationalizing technology’s ongoing progress, when it comes to BIG the scrimmages between combatants are down-played. At BIG the firm has adopted two different BIM software platforms—ArchiCAD and Revit. Yet “adopted” might be too strong a word.

“We are currently not planning on choosing one over the other,” remarked Andreassen.

Andreassen, who is BIM Manager in the Copenhagen office, said he was initially pulled into BIG about one and a half years ago to implement Autodesk Revit. However, the Copenhagen office is currently working with Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD.

“The reason we decided to try out ArchiCAD in Copenhagen is we had a perfect opportunity to try out something new. We had just finished up a lot of work and had the time to try out alternative software.”

Andreassen added that it has been a process getting architects to accept Revit and BIM tools in general. “Since BIM platforms, and Revit in particular, can appear boxy and not very intuitive—it has been hard to get architects using them, as we are insistent on pursuing experimental and innovative architectural ideas.”

“That is the reason we wanted to try ArchiCAD,” he adds. “It doesn’t solve every challenge we as architects face with BIM software but it does seem to have a different appeal among architects. The response among the architects, at least in Copenhagen, is they are actually using it a little earlier in the process.”

BIG’s primary design tool is Rhino, in both Copenhagen and New York City. At the moment the firm is using two different BIM platforms. “Our approach is to always choose the best tool for the job,” he says. “And I can’t say that we wouldn’t choose Revit for a certain project in Copenhagen…and it might also be possible that at some point we run a pilot using ArchiCAD in New York.”

Looking ahead, what is important for BIM at BIG is what Jakob Andreassen refers to as their “BIM Environment,” a flexible arena for data and file formats where information—not proprietary file formats—reign supreme. Not getting “locked in” to one file format is an imperative issue for the firm.

BIG IDEAs—The Role of Technology and Information

One of the more interesting factors at play in BIG’s current and future work is the formation of BIG IDEAS, BIG’s technology-driven special projects division. Led by partner Jakob Lange, and including experts like Tore Banke PhD, BIG IDEAS is responsible for leading the technology management behind the smoke rings at the Amager Bakke energy plant, among other things.

Jakob Andreassen adds, “Tore Banke is an expert at scripting Rhino and Grasshopper and he can do all kinds of customized environmental simulations.” BIG is well aware that its new BIM tools can also add value—to energy calculations in particular—but right now he says “they are kinda going for the low-hanging fruit and getting the designers to bring BIM into the design process.”

“With ArchiCAD we have full-scale models,” he adds, “and we are starting to use the built-in environmental simulations.” For Jakob Andreassen this is one way BIG sees architects starting to gain back control. “We still use external consultants for final details and such, but we use BIG IDEAS for simulations and tests in Grasshopper to get us pretty close to the values that are required by law.

Despite BIG’s abilities and interests in Rhino, scripting, and Grasshopper, Andreassen admits the company doesn’t currently have interest in “in-house” custom software development. The firm does industrial design through BIG IDEAS but it uses its own design staff for that work. With 100 in Copenhagen and over 140 in the New York office, BIG is easily big enough to be a force and influence on software tools development at the software provider level.

Lessons for the Future of Practice

With two Progressive Architecture 2015 honors this year, a global practice which has grown tremendously during the worst years in economic memory, and the ability to fund its own advanced technology and information design division, there are many lessons in BIG from which other architecture firms can draw from.

Insofar as they impact the role of information technologies and their abilities to enable architects to add marked value to society, perhaps the most stunning lesson is the role sheer imagination and invention has played at BIG. As a result, what we hear clearly from BIG’s Andreassen is that software prowess is important but that no one tool—especially a BIM tool—is so important that it rises to the level of the overarching ideas impacting the practice.

Bjarke Ingels’ vision of the architect as midwife squarely puts the architect’s position and responsibility with society on helping mankind adapt in the larger Darwinian sense. This counters the notion of the architect as a stylistic God…and BIG’s work is therefore not always recognizable stylistically. This is also why information has become so important, and partly why, to Andreassen as BIM Manager, the use of BIM in the earlier stages becomes more imperative and critical.

As for the de-Protestant-ization of sustainable design (“it must hurt to do good”) that Ingels suggest architects must embrace, BIG sees each environmental situation as a major ingredient in the narrative way it drums up compelling design visions. Such is the focus of their Washington DC “Hot and Cold: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaption” exhibition. (Edit. note: It runs till 30 August 2015).

Developing BIG IDEAS—its own kind of research and development division—is another lesson to the wider field of architectural practice. The idea of embracing a “lab” or research culture mindset within the practice of architecture fundamentally acknowledges the opportunity architects have to gain back control of the “build process” of architecture. BIM symbolizes many things but one thing it doesn’t yet commonly symbolize is its ability to dissolve the artificial break between the architect and the builder. In our current era, and more so in our near future, architects have the capacity to design direct to manufacture. It is only natural to hear that BIG IDEAS is involved with industrial design—and using its own architectural staff. This is fundamentally no different than learning that Jony Ive, Apple’s famed industrial designer, is heavily involved in the design of Apple’s new corporate headquarters.

At the same time BIG gets it when it comes to the value of information—hence a built-in resistance to file type entrapment. The firm seems to use information to both fuel novelty and narration in its architectural concepts. Both the idea of BIM—as a powerful open and flexible environment—and the notion of empowering the architect to combine his or her design skills with technology and information, contribute to giving the architect back more control to ensure high-level creative work that generates value to society.

 

Footnote: Additional Comments

1—The term phrase “bridge firm” was first heard by the author by architect Pete Evans AIA, senior associate editor at Architosh, who was also on the interview call with Jakob Andreassen. To Evans, it equated simply to a firm that is using BIM but has many “traditional values” about practice. This is a very general and debatable concept, and in the article it was greatly expanded towards a type of specificity that centers a firm between a more Luddite (craft…old ways) culture and a more IT-oriented (automation…new ways) culture.

If we recall the history of the Luddites in the 19th century, the debate in our context boils down to architectural craft versus automation. In the larger architectural sense, BIM’s history put forth its value from a traditional CAD (computer-aided design) perspective, suggesting its efficiencies over 2D CAD. But it also suggested its design benefits in its explicit 3D nature. However, both CAD and BIM, as vehicles of efficiency, can be admonished (by some perspectives) for focusing on the wrong values within architecture.

Creativity, as exemplified by BIG, demonstrates that finding value for architectural clients—especially “discovered” value—or what Bjarke Ingels calls Architectural Alchemy, means that no matter how sophisticated software may become, it is simply no match for the creativity of the human brain and its ability to mix and blend the unexpected. As such, at BIG, as Andreassen said several times in the interview, “software is just a tool.” As such, the BIM Environment at BIG is about being “open” so that blending and mixing are possible. For an architectural alchemist needs his tools to function like a blender that can taken everything.