2009 and Beyond | Revisiting the Report on Integrated Practice
A summary of university and industry research in support of BIM

by Renee Cheng, AIA

Summary: Chuck Eastman’s original essay in the 2006 Report on Integrated Practice, University and Industry Research in Support of BIM, focused on parametric modeling and BIM authoring tools, both of which, he says, have advanced in the past 3-1/2 years. Interoperability, another integral focus discussed in the original essay, also has gained in importance. However, the deeper cultural issues regarding the preparation of students and the changes needed in the profession have had slower progress and continue to need attention.

Markku Allison, AIA, recently interviewed Eastman about his current perspective on the industry. During that interview, Allison asked Eastman to identify the challenges still facing both the architectural academy and the profession today. If asked to rewrite his 2006 article, Eastman says he would identify the prime challenge to the profession as finding ways to leverage the capacity of the tools and work in an integrated team effectively. Eastman observes that “in some ways, the tools are ahead of practice. And, that's a good situation for us.” He believes the tools are pushing the capacity of the architecture profession and cites examples from related fields where knowledge becomes embedded in the tools (such as in manufacturing or aerospace). He also identifies the integrated design process as essential to the cultural changes needed.
(Hear the full interview.)

Eastman envisions change that requires an evolution of roles, both in the profession and in academia. Although incentives for change in the profession are tied directly to financial gain, academic change has responded to different motivations and has been slower. According to Eastman, “the universities are lagging. They're certainly very much in the mainstream, whereas the leaders are moving forward and the mainstream is not moving as fast as the leaders are.” Universities are organized to work really well, and comfortably, in their separate silos. It's much harder to get cross-disciplinary linkages in an academic setting.

When asked if he believes any particular sectors of the industry or the academy are more receptive than was the case three years ago, Eastman praises the efforts of the general-contractor and construction-management sectors and cites them as examples of incentivized evolution. “BIM forums, held quarterly by the Associated General Contractors, have drawn people from all segments of the construction industry, including architects, contractors, fabricators, and software people,” he says

Eastman believes that when the incentives for architects can be clearly understood, communicated, and connected to fees, the pace of change will accelerate. Based on the capacity for BIM tools to manage data, Eastman’s goal for architects is to:

Contribute to the design of a building that achieves particular objectives. The potential for a more performance oriented design is really the challenge for us. And I think then the role of building information modeling and IPD takes on a really strategic place in achieving those different objectives. Building information modeling—3D object based models—can carry lots of attributes and information about the performance of the objects that they involve …

Spaces that are now explicit objects in building models can carry information, like their activity levels, their internal heat load requirements, their lighting requirements, and other kinds of information that a set of architectural drawings, and certainly two dimensional CAD tools, didn't have.

To leverage these tools fully, Eastman is working at Georgia Tech to implement a set of post-professional degrees within architectural education as one model to extend the range of current education. These degrees will provide expertise regarding software tools as a workbench, using sets of them to the best advantage, abandoning obsolete cultural practices and adopting new ones, and applying tools and practices to address fabrication and prefabrication, performance-based design, collaborative design, and other aspects of practice.

Taking a technology-centric point of view, Eastman recommends “really learning competency and best practices in the development of building information modeling.” This competency is made difficult by the complexity of the spaces that architects design and the level to which they need to be quantified for design and construction. He says:

There’s really a long way to go for developing effective building models. I work with models of courthouses, and a courthouse can have more than a thousand rooms. This multiplicity of rooms often results in overlapping spaces that aren't even designated as a space. They're just voids within multiple walls in a building. A model is more than a diagram or set of graphics.

The challenge, in terms of building a well formed model, is significant.. It's a mixture between making the applications that are doing the analysis or the interpretation more sophisticated, so that the application can anticipate or can compensate for the different ways that a model might be defined … Take, for example, space names. We have about 10 or 15 synonyms for every space name within a courthouse. But we still get somebody who can find another way of naming a space that we can't understand. So we’re trying very hard to make it robust, so that we're not really saying to the designer: “You have to do it this one way or the machine won't understand.”
[Another example is] energy analysis, which is particularly challenging to create robust models. I think we'll all get our teeth really sharpened and trained on developing good modeling techniques. Those techniques allow a designer to try out different designs and quickly evaluate them from an energy standpoint.”

Complementing the need for robust models that can accept input in a variety of ways yet provide reliable information, Eastman also understands how the model/tool must be managed differently, with considerable attention to defining workflow and information needs early in the design process. Since integrated design teams have become more common, related engineering fields have an increased respect for design as an “important critical way of approaching problems … that is really a part of the basic training of architects,” Eastman says, seeing that development as a positive sign for the profession.

An active participant in the many parallel efforts to define and develop interoperability standards, Eastman takes the long view regarding the future of interoperability. Current thinking is often limited to understanding interoperability as a file exchange activity to translate from one application’s native format to another application’s format; however, the real benefits of interoperability are far greater. Although clash detection is an easily understood benefit of interoperability and BIM, Eastman considers this to be the equivalent of spell-checking software that should, in the future, simply run in the background without the need for intervention. He elaborates:

Five years from now, we'll start to see clash detection being used in our backend servers, and it will be completely automated, giving you the warnings in the same way that a spellchecker does [for example]: this doesn't work, notify the two or more people who are involved in that clash to sort it out.

… I think we're going to see more and more operations become fully automated, whether it's energy analysis or structural analysis. At least at the early concept design with validation and deep checking at the detailed design … The idea of sending things off, having them reviewed, and getting an answer back, maybe in a week, or maybe in a day, is going to come down to about five minutes. Those kinds of workflow changes will really change the nature of how we explore problems, how we solve problems, and how we collaborate.

Eastman further explains that as models become more effectively leveraged and more transparently able to exchange information, the future emphasis will be on the way we work and the flow of information among designers. The developments under way right now—such as behind the scenes clash detection, automation, and workflow-process types of issues—will have the most significant impact on our industry over the next few years or more.

Although much progress has been made in the past 3-1/2 years, Eastman concludes that “this is a hugely challenging time for everyone in the construction industry. It's an industry-wide transformation—involving not just architects, not just contractors, but everyone, including owners. The challenges also exist in different forms within the universities and schools.”

We look forward to sharing the rest of the 2009 and Beyond series, which will be released over the coming months, to further your understanding of how today’s challenges can offer tomorrow’s solutions in your practice and career.