Udd24_T12_7D

UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA

udd

24

federico soriano Textos 2020-2021

12 NG, Amelin. 7D Software as infraestructure. Revista e-flux

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On the surface, the way we document buildings may still look the same.

Modeling software, like any other tool in history, helps architects depict, design, and produce drawings for construction. But something has fundamentally changed in the ambitions of architectural visualization, and with it, relationships between representation and reality. Digital information has never been more closely coupled with the material logics and deployable flows of construction and operations across a building’s life.

In the last two decades, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has emerged as a de facto industrial-strength medium of the global Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. BIM takes on an increasingly credible vision in search of greater construction efficiencies, error reductions, labor savings, and other frontiers of optimization. New modes of representation have emerged to support ever tighter synchronizations of building information, across ever larger surface areas of spatial management. Bigness meets “BIMness.”

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Today, BIM is regarded to be on the same digitally “disruptive” plane as big data, robotics, and Virtual/Augmented Realities (VR and AR).

Beyond 3D modeling, it has acquired a worldview of no less than seven dimensions: a 4D model simulates construction time; 5D estimates building cost; 6D analyzes energy and sustainability outcomes; and 7D manages facilities using a model of the building as-built. While 7D applications are still far from achieving the ubiquity that 3D BIM software currently enjoys, architecture’s “information turn” spells a new paradigm for cataloging the built environment as a single database of linked object data, from the scale of a wall or door element to (ostensibly) a building’s entire operational life.

This warrants a materialist understanding of “architectural visualization”— one that is not reduced to an affective or rhetorical function, as is the case with renderings and other architectural eye-candy. Rather, “visualization” compounds information (visual and nonvisual) in an “optically consistent space” for the calculated coordination of an entire industry. Modeling software is a “‘universal exchanger’ that allows work to be planned, dispatched, realized, and responsibility to be attributed.” Such an optical instrument manages material facts, secures expertise, and orders realities. Visualization is therefore bound up with the apparatus of vision itself—how one sees makes possible what one sees, which makes possible what one plans to do. Unlike a rendering, the technical image is not a suggestive picture, but a proxy. Its graphics are not relevant for their symbolic qualities, but for their sociotechnical dispositions. What does “7D” allow us to see (and do)? What human-machine relations and coordinated worlds are brokered by software?

Google “Building Information Model,” and you will find two distinct visual conditions: either ultrageneric solid building mass, economically cast in some default grey Shaded View on a WYSIWIG interface; or fluorescent pink, yellow, and acid green MEP and other engineering elements, densely compacted into a barely-there building envelope. If the first conveys selfevidence and cost reliability, the second conveys coordination expertise.

This dichotomy points to a BIM model’s graphically split personality—an AEC Jekyll and Hyde.

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Reyner Banham once described the High Tech impulse as “the most recent way of bringing advanced engineering within the discipline of architecture.” BIM visuality exemplifies this union. At first, building information guts appear no differently to the 1960s/1970s proclivity for seeing pipes before architecture, or pipes-as-architecture. One is reminded of François Dallegret’s canonical Anatomy of a Dwelling, which illustrated Banham’s “baroque ensemble of domestic gadgets.” But BIM’s lurid ducts depart from the High Tech milieu of tubular exuberance.

Unlike Dallagret’s ornamental compositions, today’s labyrinthian HVAC layouts are militantly coordinated ensembles, demonstrating an ability to work-as-modeled.

Unlike the iconographic Centre Pompidou, whose exposed services are didactically denoted (general blue for air-conditioning, yellow for circulating electricity, and so on), BIM color-codes act more as durable office standards, disciplining screen vision across space and time, projects, workers and departments. For example, according to GSA BIM standards, the blue used for Compressed Air (RGB 0, 0, 255) is numerically distinguished from Domestic Cold Water (RGB 0, 63, 255), even though they look almost exactly the same. BIM’s pedantic chromatic spectrum hints at the sheer density of consultant information entering the singular scene of the model to the point where colors are not optically but numerically verified.

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Even though they are not photorealistic, BIM graphics are somehow deeply trustworthy: the building looks overwhelmingly buildable. The use of screenshots on AEC company websites to convey BIM services to a non-technical audience may contribute to this solvency. A champion of the paperless domain, screenshots mark an epistemological shift from human-checked printed documents toward that of a “virtually witnessed” reality. Developed by the CAD Project at MIT in the 1960s, screenshots established visual conventions to show a computer-oblivious public that human-machine interactivity existed. According to Matthew Allen, “Computer-aided design and the interactive computer needed a public relations campaign in 1960 because their novelty was easy to miss.” The screenshot thus contributed to the historical development of computer coordination as proof of professional expertise and to the cultivation of confidence in interactive machine intelligence.

Screenshots would later record (self-)evidence of computer-generated space planning. Used to assess architectural program layouts in the 1980s, MIT’s experimental IMAGE interface was “an interactive graphicsbased computer system for multi-constrained spatial synthesis.” IMAGE’s parameter-based space ranking and evaluation routines were tested in several “real-world” settings: MIT’s planning office, an architectural office, and in the studio classroom. A study was also conducted for the US Army Corps of Engineers, where IMAGE was used to analyze the hypothetical design of a recreation center for planning inconsistencies. While in no way claiming to generate total spatial solutions, IMAGE “provided quick, inexpensive, and wholly accountable evaluations of submitted design proposals” and was regarded as “a tool capable of helping designers to converge on design solutions.” The study concluded that IMAGE was, indeed, “helpful in the development of an architectural space program” and “could play several useful roles for agencies that monitor large numbers of building design contracts.” Machine-responsible space planning would later become integrated into smart modeling practices to the point where, today, entire rooms are parametrically guaranteed.

From analysis to application, digitalized space planning routines have become extremely efficient for Foucauldian typologies like operating theaters and prison cells, with highly prescriptive design briefs, predictable layouts and replicable object sets. [...]

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Objecthood René Magritte once admitted to the indexical limits of the image: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The treacherous pipe paradigm has held more or less true through 2D and 3D architectural drawing and modeling: the image is no substitute for the real. That was only true until simulation became a possibility. In Autodesk Revit, a pipe can be expected to perform engineering analysis and optimize fluid flows. Pipe Types now submit to “real-world systems” such as gravity and pressure. Far more than just “a” pipe, today’s parametric pipe is uniquely identified: Logiwaste_DN 400 Pipe_4311-15-TT021SS.rfa.

Pipes aside, a surfeit of exacting construction materials, calculated structural elements, product-specific appliances, and engineered finishes are parametrically available and awaiting architectural specification— even clear primer, an invisible undercoat material, can be accurately applied to your model. Smart coordination turns architectural “space” into discrete, clickable assets guaranteed of a supplier. All across the BIM object-world, generic representations give way to proxies—offering ever greater coordination between the virtual and the real.

With great object specification comes great responsibility for its storage.

Just as new archival practices arose over the nineteenth century to meet the eruption of photographs, data spreadsheets, object libraries, and clash reports register archive anxieties surrounding the mass proliferation of building data. Along with this comes, of course, liabilities, intellectual properties, and desires to control data stock. Today, virtual components are pre-approved and stockpiled in 3D warehouses on cloud or server, readily deployable for any project. Global offices like Arup have amassed in-house inventories of over 25,000 intelligent BIM objects for their engineering and architecture projects.

Software platforms are new keepers of the trade library. Even Trimble— owner of the much-maligned free modeling software, SketchUp—now offers Trimble MEP and “one stop shop” BIM content management platforms boasting eight million components. Object properties become object property. From Duravit sinks to Miele dishwashers, many major manufacturers now provide comprehensive BIM objects for entire product ranges. As architects gravitate toward clean, correct componentry for model fidelity, the menu variety and quality of virtual objects influence which supplier gets the job.

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As BIMObject, BIMSmith, RevitCity and other trade platforms gain currency, smaller players lacking BIM expertise or overheads to invest in the virtual object economy may consequently be disadvantaged in the real supply chain.

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