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?
One thing that could not have been done effectively with drawings alone was comparing the performance of different building massings and facades. Using Forma, I could compare sun hours, daylight potential, carbon emissions, and other metrics across different proposals. This made it easier to evaluate design decisions based on actual performance rather than just aesthetics. In addition, it was much faster experimenting with concepts of different ideas than drawing from scratch each time.
On the other hand, modeling was sometimes harder than drawing by hand because small changes could affect multiple parts of the model, and automated features did not always behave as expected. Limitations of the program requires a lot of work arounds (ex: manually shifting automated windows that were in front of walls, “separate buildlings” that were meant to be one unit can’t be merged together, etc).
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 did not account for specific materials, mechanical layouts, or structural elements. Essentially, it only represented the building's shape, form, and relationship to the site. However, these missing details have a significant impact on metrics such as carbon footprint and square footage, so the results were not necessarily representative of the actual building. Even geometrically, the model had limitations. It treated the building more like a series of stacked buildings rather than one connected building, which made it harder to work with floor plans and stairs across all levels.
I think these omissions would become unacceptable once a project moves beyond the early design stage and into detailed design and construction. At that point, the model needs to reflect actual materials, structural systems, and mechanical layouts to produce reliable performance results and coordinate between different building systems. While simplifying the building was useful for comparing early design options, more detailed information would be necessary before making any final decisions.
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 most like to continue using BIM and performance analysis to compare different design options and understand their tradeoffs. I also enjoyed thinking about circulation and how people would actually move through and use the space. Designing floor plans has been fun! As someone interested in structural engineering, I want to learn more about how early design decisions affect the structural system, material quantities, and embodied carbon.
The biggest gap between what I can do now and what a practicing professional does is knowing how to balance all these different considerations in a real project. There are many other factors to consider, such as building codes, budget, schedule, and client needs. This course helped me understand how to use BIM to explore different design options, but I still need more technical knowledge and experience to make decisions that are practical and realistic.