This is a borrowed alliteration. See Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette with C-Lab, “BIMness: or, The problem of integration,” in Rem Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture (Cologne: Taschen, 2018), 370–375.
According to the World Economic Forum, digital technologies “including building information modeling (BIM), prefabrication, wireless sensors, 3D printing and automated and robotic equipment, are affecting the entire industry,” “gradually changing how infrastructure, real estate and other built assets are designed, constructed, operated and maintained.” See Michael Buehler et al., “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about to hit the construction industry. Here’s how it can thrive,” World Economic Forum, June 13, 2018, ➝; in more detail, World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group, “An Action Plan to Accelerate Building Information Modeling (BIM) Adoption,” World Economic Forum, February 2018, ➝.
The 4D, 5D, 6D and 7D mentioned in this essay are (regrettably) not to be confused with the multi-dimensioned mechatronic theme park entertainment simulators from the early 2000s. See “BIM dimensions—3D, 4D, 5D, 6D, 7D BIM explained,” BibLus-ACCA software, April 18, 2018, ➝; “What is BIM?,” Autodesk, ➝. “As the successor to traditional computer-aided design (3D CAD), BIM stores and provides 3D object data. It also can include shared information on scheduling (4D), cost (5D), sustainability (6D) and operations and maintenance (O&M) (7D).” See World Economic Forum, “An Action Plan to Accelerate Building Information Modeling (BIM) Adoption”; Rajat Agarwal et al., “Imagining construction’s digital future,” McKinsey & Company, June 2016, ➝. For screenshot examples of each “dimension”, see “BIM Services,” Virtual Building Studio, ➝.
Bruno Latour’s remarks on the technical innovation of engineering drawings in “Visualisation and Cognition,” I argue, could well apply to BIM models. “Industrial drawing not only creates a paper world that can be manipulated as if in three dimensions. It also creates a common place for many other inscriptions to come together…Realms of reality that seem far apart…are inches apart, once flattened out onto the same surface. The accumulation of drawings in an optically consistent space is, once again, the ‘universal exchanger’ that allows work to be planned, dispatched, realized, and responsibility to be attributed.” Similarly, BIM gathers together a multitude of numbers, reports and material facts about a building project into a central information database, so that many eyes and hands can act on the same “reality” with ease and precision. See Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together,” in Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 26. Emphases added.
“A new visual culture redefines both what it is to see, and what there is to see.” Ibid.
After Latour, Reinhold Martin also calls for a materialist definition of architectural visualization when approaching digital modeling. “So rather than asking ‘What does this drawing mean?’ or ‘What future building does it represent?’ we might ask, ‘What commands does it issue, what does it make possible, what materials does it assemble, what objects or processes does it organize?’” See Reinhold Martin, “Points of Departure: Notes Toward a Reversible History of Architectural Visualization,” in The Active Image: Architecture and Engineering in the Age of Modeling, eds. Sabine Ammon and Remei Capdevila-Wering (Cham: Springer Verlag, 2017), 3.
This is why architects everywhere decry BIM as the bane of professional life.
MEP stands for Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing engineering services. At its broadest, this triumvirate of technical disciplines makes building interiors suitable for occupancy. In the UK and Australia, it is also known as architectural engineering, or building services engineering.
Todd Gannon, Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Centre, 2017), 244.
Banham famously ruminated on pipes-as-architecture; see Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: Architectural Press, 1969). They remained a fascination for decades, for example in the Volume 37 (November 2013) issue, “Is This Not a Pipe?”.
See Reyner Banham, “A Home is not a House,” Art in America 53, no. 2 (April 1965): 70–79.
On algorithmic color, Carolyn Kane posits: “Whether optical or algorithmic, color is not exclusively about vision. Rather, it is a system of control used to manage and discipline perception and thus reality…beyond any single viewer, physical technology, or image-artifact.” Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 211. Original italics removed.
Steven Shapin has called the screenshot a “literary technology of virtual witnessing”. See Steven Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science 14, no. 4 (1984): 481–520.
The key move of the screenshot is, as its name suggests, to show that the image is not printed or plotted conventionally but issued from a computer screen. Confusion about whether the new interactive CAD medium was a tool or a process apparently required intermediary explanation. See Matthew Allen, “Representing Computer-Aided Design: Screenshots and the Interactive Computer circa 1960,” Perspectives on Science 24, no. 6 (November-December 2016): 637–668.
“A piece of paper is obviously not interactive, but accepting a screenshot means believing that interactivity exists.” Allen, “Representing Computer-Aided Design,” 647 and 658.
Allen, “Representing Computer-Aided Design,” 658 and 664.
It is perhaps no accident that Allen uses the Centre Pompidou, the icon of High Tech, as an example of “how computational aesthetics (promulgated in part through screenshots) entered architectural culture”. Ibid, 662.
See Guy Weinzapfel, “Following the Yellow Brick Road,” in Reflections on Computer Aids to Design and Architecture, 1985, ed. Nicholas Negroponte (New York: Petrocelli / Charter, 1975), 101, footnote 1.
See Guy Weinzapfel, “Following the Yellow Brick Road,” in Reflections on Computer Aids to Design and Architecture, 1985, ed. Nicholas Negroponte (New York: Petrocelli / Charter, 1975), 97–99.
Ibid, 98.
“Automating Program Requirements for Healthcare Planning and Design,” ONUMA, www.onuma-bim.com/projects/seps2bim.
Prison abolition today, it seems, would also mean divesting from the Internet-of-Prison-Things…
Glasgow-born James Gowan is better known as the practice partner of renowned UK architect, James Stirling, under the short-lived (and acrimoniously disbanded) firm, Stirling and Gowan (1956–1963). Gowan, while part of the impulse, is not part of the canon. While certainly not a symmetrical comparison, the Gowan/Sterling tension recalls the typically uneven distribution of credit between project delivery and design firms; between architects of record and their spectacular starchitect peers. The distinction between design and technical expertise is particularly noticeable in complex building projects like hospitals, where it is not uncommon to have two architects on the job—one credited for the “design,” and the other, to ensure and manage its delivery. Accreditation and project credit do not necessitate the same labor value. For a heated forum debate on this division of labor, see “Designer & Architect of Record relationship,” Archinect Discussion Forum, ➝.
In this context, Gowan’s hand-drawn doors and beams are “inert” because their dimensional and visual properties cannot actively perform calculations and coordination. What, then, would a “active” object be? In The Active Image, BIM historian Daniel Cardoso Llach gives a historical example: “in a computer-generated image of a house, (MIT) CAD Project engineers realized that a door could be described with information about its shape but also about its material, cost, structural properties, and other attributes. A concrete beam could be described with information such as length and height, but the same data structure could be furnished with information about its structural behavior. (This ostensibly enabled) designers to instantly perform structural and cost analysis, and could be made available to different parties for coordination. It is in this precise sense that we can talk about the postwar rise of a new, structured, image marking the origins of what is today known as BIM.” Daniel Cardoso Llach, “Architecture and the Structured Image: Software Simulations as Infrastructures for Building Production,” in The Active Image: Architecture and Engineering in the Age of Modeling, eds. Sabine Ammon and Remei Capdevila-Wering (Cham: Springer Verlag, 2017), 28.
See Jerry Laiserin, “Foreword,” in BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers, and Contractors, Charles Eastman, et al (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008), xiii. Unlike Gowan’s static Section, BIM is crucially known to rely on data relationships between discrete parts. This means that the non-graphical, textual and interlinking data of a thing is just as important as the geometry of the thing itself. In Charles Eastman’s Building Description System (BDS), “properties describe all non-shape aspects of an element. A property(‘s value) may be numerical or alphabetic…the designer may store any type of property with shape. Examples might be cost, color, manufacturer, function, maximum bending moment or the element's specification.” From Charles M. Eastman, “The Use of Computers Instead of Drawings in Building Design,” AIA Journal 63 (March 1975): 49.
RUCAPS, according to dubious CAD history sources, stands for “Really Universal Computer Aided Production System”.
See Robert Aish and Nathalie Bredella, “The evolution of architectural computing: from Building Modelling to Design Computation,” arq 21, no. 1 (2017): 65 and footnote 2. Mid-sentence quote from Robert Aish, “Building Modelling: The Key to Integrated Construction CAD,” in CIB 5th International Symposium on the Use of Computers for Environmental Engineering Related to Buildings, Bath (July 1986), 55. This paper marks the first documented use of term “building modeling”. See also “Dr. Robert Aish joins Autodesk,” AEC Magazine, February 8, 2008, ➝.
See Aish, “Building Modelling: The Key to Integrated Construction CAD,” 65, Figs. 3 and 4.
While his paper is highly conceptual, Eastman is in fact very conscious of (and concerned by) the material base of an information-heavy model: “Although representing a building in all its details within a computer may be an attractive concept, practical application…requires the development of programs that are capable of allowing the description of a very large number of elements—in the order of hundreds of thousands…It requires methods for interfacing the description with various analyses programs. Most important, it requires that such a description system be implementable on widely available hardware and that it be inexpensive and easy to operate.” See Eastman, “The Use of Computers Instead of Drawings in Building Design,” 47.
BIM software such as Autodesk Navisworks are able to perform clash detection scans, algorithmic analyses used to flag colliding elements in virtual model space. It is commonly used by engineers, architects, and contractors on complex building projects, where spatial conflicts may otherwise elude the coordinating technician’s eye. In Nabholz’s screnshot, we see a truss cutting through a mechanical duct path, and a pipe intersecting a floor joist. In 1975, Charles Eastman had already foreseen clash detection technology: “The ideal representation of a building for architectural design…would accept changes easily and provide automatic checking for spatial conflicts.” See O'Donnell & Naccarato, “Clash Detection in BIM Modeling,” Association of Construction & Development, February 28, 2012, ➝; Charles M. Eastman, “The Use of Computers Instead of Drawings in Building Design,” AIA Journal 63 (March 1975): 46.
See “The Beauty of BIM,” Nabholz, January 2014, ➝. To be clear, Nabholz is not upheld as some emblematic BIM pioneer. The contractor is not particularly innovative, nor is it known for any “designer” architecture we might recognize. In 2018, Nabholz was ranked #107 on Engineering News-Record's Top 400 Contractors list. Its middle-of-the-range position (and not even an AEC company; just “C”) reminds us that BIM, Virtual Design and Construction and 4D Simulation (all services offered by Nabholz) is no longer an exceptional technology nor instrument of architectural fancy, but industry standard—almost prosaically so, now harnessed as a key value proposition by run-of-the-mill builders. See “ENR 2018 Top 400 Contractors,” Engineering News-Record, May 2018, ➝.
The building’s technical image is alleviated from the pictorial realm into that of simulation. Llach calls these “operative artifacts” or “structured images” which command numbers, rules, forces, and estimations. See Llach, “Architecture and the Structured Image: Software Simulations as Infrastructures for Building Production,” 23-52.
On the difference between traditional texts and technical visualizations, Vilém Flusser remarks: “When I envision technical images, I build from the inside of the apparatus.” Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, first published 1985), 36.
On the unreliability of computer simulation in architectural practice, Bazjanac continues: Architects “were basically looking for a mechanism to which they could transfer the responsibility of making guesses when they felt uneasy about making them themselves.” In the mid-70s, the computer was recognized as an externalized site of risk allocation—‘the computer did it, not me.’ Today, computer simulations are so relied upon that risk is intimately coupled with the worker: from date and author stamps of user actions to the (still nascent) integration of blockchain and RFID tags within BIM models. The computer recorded that it was you who did it. See Vladimir Bazjanac, “The Promises and the Disappointments of Computer-Aided Design,” in Computer Aids to Design and Architecture, ed. Nicholas Negroponte (London: Mason/Charter Publishers, Inc., 1975), 21, and “BIM with Blockchain,” in “Blockchain Technology: How the Inventions Behind Bitcoin are Enabling a Network of Trust for the Built Environment,” Arup, 2017, ➝.
Synchro Software, “Synchro Software 4D BIM/VDC Construction Project Management,” YouTube, October 30, 2016, ➝. Still taken at 1:02.
With machine-readable building information, posited Aish, models could be given rules against which to test and evaluate large, complex building designs on behalf of the user. The repetitive task of detecting clashes between pipes and structural elements, for example, “can be conveniently off-loaded to the computer, thus freeing the user to consider other more strategic issues.” Aish, “Building Modelling,” 57.
On Barak reads “a similarly apocryphal belief in the labor-saving and liberating effects of steam engines” which actually served to intensify and regularize labor. See On Barak, “Three Watersheds in the History of Energy,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 444. On the labor behind automated industries and its imbrication in contemporary politics (in which BIM has not yet, but should be, entered into the discussion), see Julieta Aranda and Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Turk, Toaster, Task Rabbit,” in SUPERCOMMUNITY: Diabolical Togetherness, e-flux journal series, eds. Julieta Aranda et al. (New York: Verso, 2017): 333–340.
James F. “Jim” Blinn, the American computer scientist behind the Voyager fly-by animations for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, formulated Blinn’s Law in the late 1970s, along with a number of other computer graphics innovations intrinsic to most rendering software today, such as environment and bump mapping. See “A Brief History of Physically Based Rendering,” in Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys, (Cambridge: Elsevier, 2017), 48–52. For a non-technical primer on the paradox of render time, see Boxx Technologies, “Blinn’s Law and the Paradox of Increasing Performance,” Computer Graphics World, July 16, 2013, ➝.
Consider the Solibri Model Checker, a quality assurance and BIM validation software used by Arup and Skanska, whose taglines include “Check more, check better,” and “We revolutionize Model Checking”. See “How it Works” and “About,” Solibri, ➝. Ironically, the software requires the architect’s Revit model be exported as a new model in a separate file format, for a BIM coordinator to review in Solibri and return as an issue report, to be followed up by the architect in the Revit model. To see this irony played out in fastidious step-by-step video format, see BIMKing, “BIM Collaboration Format between Revit and Solibri Model Checker,” YouTube, July 11, 2021, ➝.
For an insight into the kinds of conscientious operation undertaken by BIM Coordinators (an emerging role in the construction industry), see Katelyn Sanchez, “Verify! Verify! Verify! Virtual BIM Coordination for Construction,” Autodesk University, conference presentation, AU Las Vegas 2018, ➝.
“And of course, in some cases, having too many material choices and fittings can overwhelm even the most knowledgeable modelers.” Simon Whitbread, “Tips for Naming Pipe Types,” Autodesk Knowledge Network, August 30, 2016, ➝.
“Straight pipe waste, DN 400,” BIMObject, ➝.
The absurdly meticulous cataloguing of applied 3D objects even extends to materials invisible to the eye, such as clear primer. Ardex’s Solvent Based Primer is one such product, now available as its own “Building_Materials-Solvent_Based_Primer-ARDEX_WPM_270.rvt” Revit file. See BIMObject, ➝.
Allen Sekula has written on the proliferation of photographic practices in 19th century France and how the (highly racialized) development of police archives and indexing systems emerged in tandem. While criminology is markedly different from construction (or perhaps not so, given the existence of parametric prison object libraries), Sekula usefully reminds us that the archive is a system of power, and “that we would be wise to avoid an overly monolithic conception of realism”. See Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 64.
World Economic Forum with The Boston Consulting Group, “Shaping the Future of Construction A Breakthrough in Mindset and Technology,” World Economic Forum, May 2016, 38, ➝.
“BIM and prefabrication require high quality, real-world content.” See “Trimble Managed Content,” Trimble MEP, ➝.
Today many platforms not only host content but also provide BIM content creation services—the digital model has its own factory. As one platform MEPcontent put it: “Do you want to prepare your products for BIM? Provide us with the product data and we ensure that your products become available in high quality models on MEPcontent so engineers can download them from all around the globe…Whether you want rapid production from a parametric database, enriched families or you require a custom-made app, our content factory meets your demands.” See “Create BIM content in our factory, MEPcontent, ➝.
For distinctions between “dumb graphics” and “intelligent” objects, see Rick Rundell, “1-2-3 Revit: Not All BIM is Parametric,” Cadalyst, February 15, 2005, ➝.
See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux 10, November 2009, ➝.
“All About the IoT: How Sensors, Gateways, and the Cloud Form the Internet of Things,” Laird Connectivity, October 1, 2019, ➝.
Revit calls its parametric components Families. Broken Families (i.e. objects that don't inter-associate properly and are thus no longer “smart”) have been a perennial source of frustration for BIM users everywhere. See, for example, forum post by mark b, “2015 Broken my families,” Revit Forum, May 5, 2014, ➝; forum post by Jessicas, “Family constraints breaking for unknown reason,” Autodesk Knowledge Network, April 6, 2017, ➝.
Paradoxcially, “dumb” documentation may still be the currency of the day. Trimble’s business manager of engineering Stuart Broome has remarked that engineers are contractually bound to “dumb down” their 3D models into 2D drawings for clients, and that “engineers may be afraid of providing too much detail in models that would make them accountable if something goes wrong in a project. Architects and constructors also tend to adopt this risk-averse position, based on personal conversations with a professor at Texas A&M’s Construction Science Department in November 2018. See Michael Molitch-Hou, “BIM and AEC in 2018: Industry Leaders Weigh in,” engineering.com, December 29, 2017, ➝.
See “Online 3D Navigation,” Ecodomus, ➝.
“Personnel & Occupancy,” SpaceIQ, ➝.
“The economic value of BIM technology is often weighed by measuring the ratio of return on investment, or ROI. Adopting BIM processes is becoming increasingly popular at all stages of the building’s lifecycle – that is, from design to construction and through operations and maintenance. Consequently, the role of ROI in technology-decision making is shifting.” Erin Rae Hoffer, “Achieving Strategic ROI: Measuring the Value of BIM,” Autodesk, 2016, 4, ➝.
Trimble, for example, now provides Mixed Reality (AR with real-time feedback) software for architecture, engineering, construction, mining and utilities disciplines. Trimble Connect for Hololens is a wearable eyepiece that overlays precise and cloud-updated holographic data over the individual worker’s real field of vision on a job site. According to one construction worker piloting the technology, the value of such Mixed Reality vision would be in remodeling projects, where the model can be coordinated on site against “what’s already there.” See “Mixed Reality,” Trimble, ➝; Trimble MEP, “Construction workers try Trimble Connect for HoloLens for the first time.. here is what happened!,” YouTube, January 24, 2018, ➝.
See “BIM 360 Ops,” Mac AppStore, ➝.
The integration of BIM and FM into a 7D model has been called an “electronic owner’s manual” that capitalizes on the data-rich BIM model for building management. See Claire Mao and Dusan Selezan, “Integration of BIM and Facility Maintenance: What Does the FM Crew Really Need?” Autodesk University, ➝.
See Wired Brand Lab, “Creating a building’s ‘digital twin,’” IBM Internet of Things, November 1, 2017, ➝.
The term “digital twin” term was coined in 2003 by Michael Grieves for his Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) courses at the University of Michigan. Like CAD history, the technology was initially envisioned for automotive and aviation industries, later expanded to encapsulate buildings and civil infrastructure, from transport to water. For a recent report explaining this, see “Digital Twin: Towards a Meaningful Framework,” Arup, November 2019, ➝.
Jim Baumann, “Digital Twin Helps Airport Optimize Operations,” ESRI, 2019, ➝.
“The constant vigilance—or presence, really—of a building’s ‘digital twin’ offers other more subtle benefits” such as solving “the mystery of a broken piece of critical machinery” via the scanning of surveillance footage. Ibid.
See Mark Venables, “Digital Twins Provide A Window Into The Future For Ageing Assets,” Forbes, August 26, 2018, ➝; Aaron Parrott and Lane Warshaw, “Industry 4.0 and the digital twin: Manufacturing meets its match,” Deloitte Insights, May 12, 2017, ➝; “The ‘digital twin’—a bridge between the physical and the digital world,” coBuilder, July 5, 2018, ➝.
Michel Feher, Rated Agency (New York: Zone Books, 2018), 19. Simulation software is also being used to “strengthen” manufacturers’ business cases. In the Autodesk promotional article introduced in footnote 2, HUNTAIR, Inc.'s Healthcare director Kevin Schreiber makes a statement that directly ratifies Feher’s claim: “Having Autodesk technology as a part of the process lends credibility to what we’re saying, and that’s huge.” See “HUNTAIR, Inc. uses BIM to help hospitals reduce post-operative infections”, Autodesk, ➝.
This is a play on Bruno Latour’s famous articulation that drawings draw things together. The building information model, quite literally, gathers together all kinds of building data over time into a single linked database for future production. See Bruno Latour, “Visualization and cognition: Drawing things together,” in Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6, ed. Henrika Kuklick (Stamford: JAI Press, 1986), 1–40.