Thank you for those honest enough to admit the down sides to BIM rather than drink the BIM Kool Aid and get on the band wagon blindly. I use Vectorworks 2011 and I am working on learning its BIM capabilities so that the computer can do some of the work for me. I believe it is the smart direction to move and I'd love to get CD's done quicker and avoid human error. Of course we all love seeing our designs in 3d.
However, we are architects and we are the humans in charge here. It is our still our job to design, manage and coordinate our projects. Using technology to increase productivity and reduce errors is an obvious choice to pursue. I am not opposed to BIM as a concept, but as a sole proprietor, the learning curve is much longer since I am doing so many different things everyday in addition to drawing on the computer. Many days I am barely on my computer because I am on the phone or out at some meeting. I feel I am an expert at 2d CAD and only 'good' at 3d modeling and rendering. However, at building a BIM model, I seem to get in my own way. I want the computer to do it my way, but it won't obey.
My larger, more fundamental problem with BIM is it forces us to design and produce our designs counterintuitive to how we've been trained and how we think as architects. It wants precision and information too early. I still draw and sketch with pencils and fat markers on yellow trace. There is a fluidity to that process. Even drafting by hand is still loose because it doesn't require the exactness that a computer demands. Even CAD requires a specific dimension to enter information. Now BIM exaggerates that and wants not just physical size and location, but the other data that I can't even think about until I have a design concept.
Yes, it's cool to blow smoke out of the computer with quick 3d images to impress clients, but is it good design? I am in favor of any tool that can allow us to quickly study spatial concepts and test multiple ideas, yet I find it can often "hide" the weakness of the design by wooing us with cool rendering techniques. Believe me, I've been fooled by them myself. I've been guilty of feeling "satisfied" with a design long before its had time to fully develop.
My last problem is my office does mostly renovations and additions. New buildings have been rare these days. I don't have the patience or fee to build a model of an existing building. I am a stickler for beautiful, detailed drawings, but I can do that much quicker with traditional CAD tools. Some of you have been honest to explain the weaknesses of BIM when it comes to detail. At a small scale, the drawing may look just fine, but what happens when we need to enter the detail? At 1-1/2" = 1'-0" scale, we find the 1/8"=1'-0" cartoon just doesn't cut it.
My work is generally not repetitive, my details are custom and I find the "smart" objects in my program to be a bit clunky looking. They're hard if not impossible to edit, and I know from colleagues, that Revit is equally as guilty.
I said before, the contractors that I work with on small projects wouldn't have a clue to know what to do with digital information. What will it accomplish to have a 3d intelligent model of a small project? We have great contractors, but we still work on paper here in Pennsylvania.
I've seen many buildings in magazines where they've celebrated how it was designed using Revit. To be honest, looking at the buildings, it is obvious that Revit deserves the credit. The designs are average at best.
I hope we train future architects to still be architects and only use BIM as a tool. I said before, I am in favor of moving towards BIM appropriately, but I am struggling to find a way to use it completely. I hope the software companies learn how to program it to us as architects, rather than force me to change how I think to use the tool.
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Lee Calisti AIA
Principal
lee CALISTI architecture+design
Greensburg PA
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-04-2011 01:03
From: Kenneth Brogno
Subject: REVIT for small projects
Very good points Darrel.
The largest impediment that I see for using Revit is its "exactitude." I think that you correctly pointed out its "crudeness", but I think therein lies a paradox. There can be many stalls during a Revit session when some part of a procedure doesn't meet an unwieldly or counter intuitive protocol. Users may get error messages prohibiting forward progress and give up.
There is nothing wrong with imperfect documents depending upon the degree of imperfection. At times Revit doesn't give users any opportunities for any kind of imperfections. For as much a tool like Revit trumpets its capabilities for quantifying, you would think that it would also be able to quantify the imperfections in the model without causing the whole thing to be unusable.
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Ken Brogno AIA
Architect
San Francisco CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-03-2011 09:09
From: Darrel Odom AIA LEED AP
Subject: REVIT for small projects
I have been using Revit for six years on small projects. The primary benefit is getting 3D images almost immediately for my client and for my benefit. Once I got up to speed (6-9 Months) and built up a library of families that worked for my type of projects (schools, churches, and office buildings) I found Revit to be faster than Autocad on new projects. On renovations, it is too time consuming to build a Revit model of the existing building in order to do some minor addition or renovation.
Autodesk tries to imply that a complete building information model can be created that does a lot of the work for the contractor and that every design professional, general contractor, subcontractor, and owner in the world needs to buy and use Revit. I think they exaggerate that bigtime. The Contract Documents communicate the design intent to the Contractor(s) not the exact methods and materials required to get there. The information in the overall building is very general and good for preliminary cost estimating only. Yes, there are intelligent objects that the architect can assign cost data, manufacturer, quantity, etc. to them and accept the liability for the accuracy of that info. But there are still crude "work-arounds" that create roofs, objects, and site components that don't work at all as to providing building information. The best example is if I model a standing seam roof to create realistic images I have to use the sloped glazing tool, eliminate the frames in the horizontal direction, and glaze with metal to simulate a standing seam roof. How does a contractor do a take-off with that?!?!
In time, many owners may call for a complete BIM project including all consultant's work. Autodesk has provided Revit Structural and Mech but Revit has very crude, at best, site tools. Autodesk acts like every Architect will hire a Civil Engineer using a, yet to be produced, Revit Civil Software, and they don't need to provide basic BIM site tools in Revit. I have complained to every Autodesk rep I encountered for six years with no results.
One irritant about Revit is it is obvious that the Revit software engineers are focused on the Bimmy/3D end of Revit and aren't concerned about the basic "drafting" tools. Autodesk, still, makes far more money serving the CADCAM manufacturing world where the user is "drafting" widgets and needs efficient tools to do so. Simple things like "hit space bar to repeat last command" in Autocad, still cannot be replicated in Revit. It is a two or three click mouse journey across the screen to repeat the last command in Revit. It took years for them to finally get the "box to the right to select crossing objects and box to the left to select interior objects."
Overall, I give Revit a B- grade, but if they really added site tools and got more efficient in the drafting end of it, I would give it an A-. I can't give it an "A" because I think they exaggerate the effectiveness of the BIM product and it is just not as powerful, yet, as they claim. JMVHO
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Darrel Odom AIA
President
Odom Peckham Architecture, Inc.
Little Rock AR
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