If so, Google Adam West and lighten up and also, see below:ĭiving deep back into my vault of colorful memories from my time as architecture student, I don't think any of my successful projects came to life because I was thinking about how to build a footing properly to take on the massive loads created by a crazy cantilever I designed. You're familiar with the concept of the Bat Signal, unless your only experience with Batman is with the more recent, heavily emo iteration of the Dark Knight. One of my favorite methods is what I've taken to calling the "Bat Signal" method. Integrating these into your construction drawings in BIM is stupidly easy and affords all kinds of increased creativity in showing how things go together. Though time consuming, they were often my favorite details, and contractors' as well, because of the instant communication of an idea that might have taken 3-4 convoluted 2D details to convey, or 15 minutes of a meeting. Little axos were used often to show corner conditions or transitions when 2D got too crowded or just didn't cut it.
Gone are the days of switching to ISO mode and redrawing a detail with 3 locked axes, which just describing is making me both sleepy and angry. One of the adjustments to make when using BIM for drawing production after years of AutoCAD is remembering that you have all of this information in three dimensions at your fingertips, if things are modeled correctly. But we really all are capable of that in delivering a design product, by working smart! Now, I am totally on board and excited about our future projects. As a small design firm in a competitive environment, we need to work fast, cheap and well – to hell with the old saying that we have to pick two.
My husband and business partner told me this would be the result of BIM, but I didn't really believe him at the time. Instead of having to develop ideas first in plan format, then elevation format, then in detail, we design holistically, shifting all our energy from rote production tasks to developing our design's expression, character and forms in 3d. What I have learned in the past 8 months has been that I can have more purposeful projects. I'm almost to the point where I can hire interns. I can't believe I am saying this because one year ago, I told my best friend/architect buddy that there was no way I was learning the software. What I have realized in my first year of learning BIM in my practice is that we are spending about 50% of our time designing and only 50% of our time managing the construction set, which is yielding more thoughtful architecture.