The advanced descriptive, analytical and
communicative capabilities of digital tools are encouraging their ever wider
adoption in the building industry, which is now beginning to come to grips with
the practicalities of leveraging the computing power that has revolutionized
the industrial design, electronics, aircraft, boat-building, and auto
industries. A significant number of architects have been encouraged by these
technologies to propose and undertake projects of much greater complexity
(whether formal, organizational, or both) than are found conventional practice,
and the engineers and builders with whom they work are correspondingly
challenged to bring CAD/CAM to bear in their own work. But it is precisely this
concept of “their own” work that poses the largest question, the greater
challenges: in blurring the lines between architecture, engineering, and
building, what becomes of the lines of ownership and responsibility?
Decades, even centuries, of effort have gone
into creating the present sets of regulations and contractual forms governing
the design and construction of buildings. Older still are the concepts of
property that are underlying motivation of much human activity. Digital
working, on the other hand, implies (if it does not demand) a significant
transgression of many of these boundaries. Certainly a good number of the most
significant digitally produced buildings have, in one or more respect,
succeeded by bringing over these barriers, allowing these projects to make the
most of interdisciplinary collaboration and in many cases the elision of normally
distinct building functions. Should all digitally produced works strive to do
the same? What can architects, engineers, builders, building owners (perhaps
even regulators and attorneys) do to facilitate such blurring where it is
deemed desirable?
To be sure, questions like these are not
entirely unique to the building industry. Ever widening adoption of the
internet has raised a host of intellectual property issues, and a burgeoning
branch of legal effort is emerging to address these. On the other hand, many of
the other industries to which the digital evangelical in architecture point as
exemplars do not face the same hurdles. Specifically, the aircraft and
automotive industries, as well as industrial design producers (of consumer
goods, and so on) tend to encompass the entire conception and production
in-house, with only limited outsourcing. Design-build, if you will. Boat-builders
differ somewhat, more nearly approaching the fragmented supply chain typical of
building construction as noted earlier, and they are therefore perhaps a more
relevant example to architecture, though their logical challenges are still not
as extensive. Yet the problems in building persist. The architects develop a
digital model which their various engineering and other consultants can readily
analyze, and, where necessary, reconfigure. Assuming that after all of the modifications
are made someone can check that the design “documents” are correct: Who owns
the design? Say that constructability and other logistical and economic factors
are successfully addressed through early involvement of the contractors: Who is
responsible for “means and methods”?
Rethinking the procurement process required to
fully exploit CAD/CAM’s advantages leads generally to design-build as the
preferred paradigm, in which many of the customary defensive obstacles are
mitigated or eliminated by sharing financial risk and reward. Whereas the
conventional “throw it over the fence” organizational model does at least have
the advantage of giving fairly hard and fast rules about responsibility and the
compensation for accepting it, the seamless flow envisioned by digital working
methods requires much greater flexibility (and perhaps agility) from the
participants. The success of a
collaboration among architects, engineers, and builders depends to a great
extent simply on their willingness to “throw away the rule book” and streamline
the flow of information and ideas where they see mutual advantage in doing so.
Often, if the majority of the project team proposes to work this way, the
building owner will go along with this.
As an alternative, recent studies have
indicated that negotiated-bid (or “construction manager" at risk)
contracts result in only slightly greater cost and time but much greater client
satisfaction that does design-build. In order to effect this, architect can in
some cases work from the outset of a project (or special part of a project) with
contractors able to use CAD/CAM effectively, negotiating a price and allowing
the design to evolve longer into the construction documentation phase. In so
doing they may eliminate conventional documentation and its attendant production
costs, duplications of effort, and inaccuracies in large measure.
Within a more conventional procurement scheme,
architects can prequalify contractors
with CAD/CAM capability, recognizing that they must also accommodate
conventionally skilled ones for particular aspect of the project. Success on
this front depends largely on the designer's abilities to either produce
fabrication information that the contractors can use with confidence or find
contractors who have already converted to digital production. Frequently the
result is not a less expensive project but an equally expensive though more
complex one, and the amount of the designer's time required for troubleshooting
is substantial.
In any
procurement scheme, then architects and engineers can aim to design mainly in
3-d and derive the required 2-D documents (as need by building officials, some
non-CAM-capable contractors, and so on) from 3-D models, in order not to incur
a large premium for duplicated effort. This of course requires software with
appropriate capabilities "out of the box" or jury-rigged in-house.
The former is less prevalent and the latter more so, leading all but the most
committed designers to continue working in 2-D, but the emerging availability
of better tools with more seamless modeling - drawing integration and object-oriented
data structures means that we can look forward to more widespread adoption of
" whole building" digital models in the coming years, with more
promiscuous information-sharing as a result.
What sorts of checks and balances can the
project team bring to bear in order to maintain the quality of their work in
such fluid circumstances? Some sort of
“master model” in digital format is essential. Typically this model will
describe the primary geometric characteristics of the project and, in the case
of components that are "digitally contracted", also the scope of the
work as a quantity output from the model. Sometimes the geometric relationships
are definable by rules (as in parametric relational modeling) and in this case
it may suffice to transmit these rules to each of the project's participants
for them to reconstruct their own copies of the model. In the absence of such
rules, as with "point clouds" and other highly complex special data,
the individual data points themselves must be transmitted to all concerned. In
either case it is then the responsibility of each party to verify the accuracy
of the model upon which they will build their own components of the project.
Of course, updating the master model and all
derivative models will be necessary as the point evolves, and the amount of
effort and degree of reliability associated with these updates is a matter of
significant concern. Clearly the
updating process is easiest when all parties use a common modeling platform
(and in some cases consultants' and contractors' participation in the project
may be made contingent upon obtaining the requisite software), but this is not
always possible. Parametric and similar modeling capability may also be
preferable when design changes are definable as incremental rather than
whole-sale modifications. Let us bear in mind , though, that the entire issue
of design change notifications is not well resolved in the building industry
generally (visualize the difficulty of spotting individual but not always
explicitly specified changes by overlying physical drawings or layers of
digital drawings), so we can expect that digital technologies will perhaps
improve upon and not degrade current performance if proper contract standards
are developed. In the short term, and for project teams not yet wise in the
ways of digital production, it is possible that the rate of increase in
complexity (of buildings or just of data structures) outpaces the improvement
in the ability to coordinate complexity.
The significance of these advances depends on
which participants (in the design, engineering, and fabrication process)
develop the complete technical model. To get the most from this approach
architecture and engineering teams need to be more aware of fabrication issues
but, many architects simply do not want the level of involvement (and
corresponding control and responsibility) that the CAD/CAM continuum can offer.
It is true that architects typically do not have, nor perhaps even want, the
skills required to specify means and methods of construction. However, they can
synthesize the abilities and coordinate the efforts of contractors, suggest
construction systems and design within, or nearly within, the constraints
imposed by available means of production supported by accurate (digital)
documentation that contractors can rely on. Where successful, this method can
result in improved economy as well as more ambitious design, because much of
the contractor's effort expended in interpreting and re-presenting the design
becomes unnecessary.
For those architects and engineers who do take
on this expanded area of responsibility, careful consideration is necessary of
the skills required to produce reliable data for digitally driven
manufacturing, lest they end up producing and "owning" a pile of scrap.
Currently there are only limited technological means of assuring such quality. Instead,
it is matter of designers acquiring the necessary knowledge through formal or
informal education, ranging from early exposure to such issues in their
university coursework through opportunities to practice at the entire
design/detail/fabricate continuum on the job, and perhaps even to internship or
other practical experience in the employment of CAM-capable builders. (This is
not a new prescription, by the way, but only a reiteration of a long-standing
call for designers to reacquaint themselves with the problems of building in
order to be more effective designers, a call now lent additional weight by the
integrative potentials of CAD/CAM).
The outcome of the emerging power of information
technology is that architects should leverage their improved design and
communication capabilities in order to continue to be able to offer
"architectural design" - that is, inclusion of attention to human
factors - at an acceptably low premium. Otherwise building owners may resort
exclusively to ordering buildings from design-build firms which will be able to
design facilities using parameterized models of building types, for example. Thus,
the ultimate questions are not about how to use computers but: Who will take
the best advantage of them, and what will be the effect on the built
environment?
To summarize, existing contract forms require
some modifications, to encourage information flow among the parties involved in
a project and best realize the advantage of CAD/CAM, if the current multiparty
model of project-team composition is to survive, such as where architects work
with contractors through a CM at risk. Education of designers requires some
modification to better qualify them for working within such procurement
processes. Collaboration between architects, engineers, fabricators and
contractors must be encouraged, beginning in schools. Sadly, the opposite is
often the case today - at both the educational and professional levels. Software
(and to some extent hardware) must continue to develop in the direction of more
useful functionality (both general and building-oriented), more transparent and
reliable data-transfer among applications, and better user interfaces that do
not require extensive programming skills in obtaining useful results with
reasonable effort.
And as for the revolutionary impact of new
materials and fabrication processes, it seems likely these will take care of
themselves inasmuch as human inventiveness continues to unearth heretofore
unimagined materials and processes and continues to rediscover and reapply old
ones.
*[:SOHOArchitects] would like to thank Andre
Chazar and Jim Glymph for the provided information.
