The transformative power of BIM.
◦ Which specific thing in this course could not have been done with drawings alone?
◦ Which things were harder in a model than they would have been by hand?
Technical analyses, such as sun hours and daylight, would have taken an incredibly long time to do by hand for the whole building, especially when considering multiple facade designs. For this project, it was essential to be able to rapidly iterate on ideas and test out different massings and facades. Drawing by hand would have slowed that process down.
Creating the floor plans was much more challenging to model than to do by hand. It was difficult for me to learn how to use Forma and figure out the grid tool. A drawing would have been a much more streamlined method, at least initially, although I am getting faster with the software.
Your building is a set of decisions, most made before you knew enough.
◦ Which decision are you most confident was right, and what evidence supports it?
◦ Which would you revisit, and what would you need to know first?
You produced roughly thirty deliverables across ten weeks.
◦ Which one taught you the most, and why?
◦ Which felt like busywork at the time and turned out to matter later?
Every model in this course was a simplification.
◦ What did your model never know about your building?
◦ At what point in a real project would those omissions become unacceptable?
My model never understood the qualitative experience of being inside a building. Building modeling is mainly effective for quantitative analysis (sun hours, daylighting, total carbon, massing, etc.), but the software would work just as well for a poorly designed building as for a good one. For example, it never told me that one of my apartments had no exterior window. It is up to the user to design a building that is well thought out and pleasant to inhabit.
In a real project, the success of a building is largely determined by how much people want to inhabit the space. If a building is truly unpleasant (hard to find the entrance, dark hallways, apartments with no views, etc.), then the project has failed. That means these omissions become unacceptable once the design moves past early studies and into the details of how people will actually live there. Modeling software is a tool for visualizing ideas more rapidly and effectively, but it does not replace the human using it.
What's next?
◦ Which part of this work would you want to do professionally?
◦ What is the biggest gap between what you can do now and what a practising professional does?
I would really enjoy designing buildings professionally. I am an architecture major and hope to become an architect when I graduate. This class excites me because it gives me more tools to develop sustainable designs. It has also been a learning experience in what works and what doesn’t, and I now have instincts for how to design a better building in the future.
The biggest gap is practice. I feel like I need to use this software more, do more architecture studios, and see more buildings before I feel confident in my ability. I am very excited for when that happens!