By Tomás Méndez Echenagucia and Renee Cheng, FAIA
The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has been notoriously lagging in productivity when compared to other industries[1, 2]. When studying the reason for this, analysts point their fingers at a wide range of issues, from real estate dynamics, to lack of innovation, regulation, risk aversion, inability to work well across disciplinary differences, and lack of digitalization among others. Many of those reasons are somewhat inherent to the AEC industry, given the products it creates. Buildings are quite large and costly, location specific, and land use intensive. They require teams with a wide range of expertise that comes with different tools, languages, and practices. Some of these reasons may be contributing to the slow adoption of digital tools. But none of those reasons preclude the industry from harnessing digitalization to drive innovation. The industry can learn a lot from any other industry who has undergone technological change by investing in open-source infrastructure.
In July of 2020, a community of international design firms wrote an open letter to Autodesk, developers of the most widely used BIM application (Revit), to express their concerns about the “the increasing cost of ownership and the operation of Autodesk’s Revit software and fundamentally its lack of development”.[3] The letter complains about years of stagnation in the software’s performance and productivity, while at the same time becoming much more expensive to run. Among the signatories of the letter are some of the most innovative firms working today, and within them a large subset of very talented design technologists, coders, and computational designers. What is revealing about this episode is how the firms see their practice as being highly dependent on this single software package, and how they continue to invest millions of dollars each year on software they say “increasingly finds itself a constraint and bottleneck”.[3] These competing firms organized around the letter to voice their grievance, but have so far not organized to find a solution to the underlying problem: the outsourcing of software infrastructure that is fundamental to our industry. While architects have a very long tradition of making their own design tools[4], of creating and disseminating instrumental knowledge[5], the industry has so far failed to organize around the creation of widely used open-source software tools that can drive the digitalization of the profession.
The largest technology companies in the world collaborate openly on fundamental building blocks, such as programming languages[6], operating systems[7], hardware[8], and large datasets[9], while at the same time fiercely competing for customer’s time, attention, data, and dollars. The ubiquitous USB port and Linux Operating System are examples of hardware and language that global competitors accept as a standard. They collaborate on open-source infrastructure because they recognize the efficiencies and advantages of doing so. The key advantage is not only the lowering of development and operation costs, but the creation of common platforms that can be used by everyone, allowing them access to larger markets, wider interoperability and potential innovations. They recognize that a fragmented digital environment can limit their customer base and reduce the impact of their research and development (R&D) investments. The AEC industry is a diverse body, composed of tens of thousands of architecture firms in the US alone[10], and many more engineering and construction firms. It would seem clear that, to support innovation and integration in AEC, a robust digital infrastructure that is accessible to all, that can be improved by all, would be very valuable to these businesses and their clients. Common building blocks benefit everyone in the AEC, maximizing their investment and lowering barriers to potential partners.
It’s tempting to seek answers to this fragmentation by turning to BIM in general or Revit and Autodesk in particular. Among the requests in the 2020 open letter was an investment in the IFC standard[11]. Since that time, there has been success establishing a built environment standard and an increased compatibility among different software applications. But the larger and more important goal has not been met. IFC has not resulted in a larger and more competitive ecosystem of tools. We still need to work on this goal and it needs to go well beyond BIM. In the context of our environmental crisis, and the responsibility the AEC bears and has pledged to address[12, 13], we will need a robust program for the creation, operation, and adoption of environmental AEC software, data, and tools capable of having a powerful positive impact on how we build and operate our cities. We face important challenges on the adoption of LCA, circular design and construction, design for disassembly, operational efficiency, to name a few. It is especially important that the best tools, data, and methods be freely shared and adopted by the industry at large.
There are a good number of AEC related open-source software tools and libraries created by individuals, firms, academic institutions, and government agencies. Some are widely used in the industry; some have a more internal or small adoption. Regardless of how accessible or well-known they are, they fall short of their potential impact. Until there is a large organization, or a cohesive harmonization effort, they will never be more than the sum of their individual applications. The digitalization of design tools, the rise of digital pre-fabrication and mass customization, construction tech, represent an opportunity for more rapid innovation, vertical integration, and different revenue streams. But this revolution can’t take place in a fragmented and closed digital environment. It is time for the industry to organize and create the building blocks for its digital future, openly and collaboratively.
Footnotes:
- The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30845
- Reinventing construction through a productivity revolution https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/reinventing-construction-through-a-productivity-revolution
- Open letter to Autodesk. http://aecmag.s3.amazonaws.com/AEC_Autodesk_customer_letter.pdf
- Mario Carpo: The Alphabet and the algorithm
- Andrew Witt, A machine epistemology in architecture
- The Python Software Foundation https://www.python.org/psf-landing/
- The Linux Foundation https://www.linuxfoundation.org/
- Arduino https://www.arduino.cc/
- Big Data: 33 Brilliant and Free Data Sources Anyone Can Use https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/02/12/big-data-35-brilliant-and-free-data-sources-for-2016/?sh=2d26958fb54d
- https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-businesses/architects-united-states/
- Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) https://www.buildingsmart.org/standards/bsi-standards/industry-foundation-classes/
- AIA Climate action plan. https://www.aia.org/resource-center/climate-action-plan
- ASCE Policy statement 360 - Climate change. https://www.asce.org/advocacy/policy-statements/ps360---climate-change
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Tomás Méndez Echenagucia is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington’s department of Architecture. His research is focused on the use of simulation, computational geometry and optimization algorithms to make building components more sustainable. He holds a double degree in Architecture from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Politecnico di Torino, as well as a PhD in Architecture and Building Design also from the Politecnico di Torino. He has practiced as an architect and consultant in Europe and South America. His work includes several research pavilions and prototypes, including the “Armadillo Vault” for the Venice Biennale in 2016 and the ETH Pavilion in New York City in 2015. He completed a five year postdoctoral researcher position at the Block Research Group in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich, where he was a project lead in the HiLo research unit. Tomás is a co-developer of the COMPAS framework, an ecosystem of modeling, design and simulation tools, ranging from Finite Element Analysis to geometric acoustics.
Renée Cheng is the John and Rosalind Jacobi Endowed Dean of the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments and a graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Harvard College. She is a licensed architect, honored twice as one of the top 25 most admired U.S. design educators by DesignIntelligence, and has a history of leading innovative graduate programs linking research with practice and licensure.
(Return to the cover of the May 2024 PM Digest)