Questioning the Role of BIM in Architectural Education: A Counter-Viewpoint

Professor Renée Cheng's recent Viewpoint article, Questioning the Role of BIM in Architectural Education, misses an important point—by defining BIM simply as a newer type of representational CAD tool or model-making skill, we are overlooking its potential as enabling a new type of design process, one whose introduction into the realm of architectural pedagogy could provide a much-needed stimulus for the modernization of architectural education. Professor Cheng laments BIM tools as fomenting the dissolution of a teaching process stressing hand-to-eye drawing and visualization skills (and of their adjacent influence on intuitively-derived design partí), methodologies which are essentially founded on those that were taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the turn of the 19th century. She regards BIM as a "player-piano" type of device, suggesting that BIM comes with, or leads to, designs with pre-defined answers or forms; that it contains no path of "self-discovery" leading to the derivation or development of those forms but that the BIM tools automatically provide them based on the limits of what's been programmed into them—so if, for example, the BIM tools don't support NURB surfaces, then one shouldn't expect to see projects or ideas with sinuous forms, only those with orthogonally-based, angular shapes. She sounds a cautionary note about BIM providing pre-rationalized answers of a more technically-oriented nature and thus molding students into subservient custodians of information they're not yet fully prepared to grasp, especially given the rigors of experience-driven (and liability-filled) professional practice.

Preserving the core tenet of architectural education as one engendering an ongoing lifelong pursuit of knowledge—one that fosters thinking critical to, or encourages analysis of, established sets of conditions—should certainly be an incontrovertible foundation of any architect's career. As Professor Cheng correctly states in her opening paragraph, "It is far more appropriate to consider architectural education as the beginning of a life-long process of inquiry rather than as a direct input/output mechanism." However, this idealistic tenor is quickly dampened in her article by an overall air of cynicism that identifies BIM as a set of tools leading toward conclusive rather than deductive or exploratory ends.

However, when BIM is defined as a process—as it should be—it begets performative information and simulative environmental conditions into design, placing an emphasis on "the underlying logic of design." It uses digital means to enable critical analysis of such data and, most importantly, engenders its exchange between architects and engineers via new collaborative methods. This type of information and its inherently collaborative process can well be regarded as positing an entirely new, entirely fresh approach to design, one that would mandate a need to be practiced very much beginning in architecture school.

The established notion of traditional design education is to foster the individual's creative talents through an undefined journey into one's design "psyche," where intuition, functional factors, as well as intangible conditions "discovered" along the journey should then lead to an "informed" design partí. An understanding and acceptance by the student of this process is then given as leading to "practice," whereby similarly educated individuals form into a collective charge. Experience gathered in practice is then "handed down" as a collection of skills acquired over time. BIM, figuratively speaking, shreds this commonly accepted practice to bits. In a BIM-enabled process, individual students may follow a similar foray into their design psyche but are also encouraged, and (most importantly) enabled, to act upon their ideas by digitally analyzing, critiquing, and then simulating conditions portraying those ideas. This in turn can lead to design conditions "informed" by data, finalized into an assembly "informed" by conditions—fed analytically as well as intuitively. This process, however, will require architects who are trained to think analytically and critically about what they're designing, and to then simulate their decisions in validating—and not just positing—what they're proposing through conditional and intuitive means. Digital analysis fostered by the BIM process—be it morphological, physiological, or psychological—and an architect's ability to synthesize and express analytical results into a validated, cohesive, conceptual framework will, in this manner, fundamentally continue what architecture is all about.

Professor Cheng states, "Education's most important role is to shape the trajectory of exploration after graduation, thus contributing to the future of the profession." And yet, it is commonly acknowledged that most architecture schools grads will have to fight for the very conditions which meaningfully embody the inward design methodology they've just been exposed to. Unfortunately, most end up not thinking so much about analysis or simulation models but rather about how they'll electronically arrange lines on a properly-defined set of CAD layers, or how they'll artistically model and then render 3D representations of someone else's designs. The educational status quo, therefore, already manifests itself in the very type of mind-numbing CAD exercises that Professor Cheng is so apprehensive BIM tools will encourage.

The transformation of the traditional linear architectural education process into one more elliptical—by incorporating BIM as a process and not a tool—is the single most difficult challenge (or exciting opportunity, depending upon how you look at it) at hand for today's educators. Furthermore, it is presumptuous to assume that the introduction of new software tools categorized as "BIM" must only come directly from commercial vendors. Credit today's architecture students with already having the moxie and creative proclivity to write their own scripts, to combine or "mash up" their own variety of pre-existing tools, to even go so far as to modify existing application interfaces to suit their own particular needs when the design challenges posed to them mandate "outside-the-box" thinking.

In conclusion, BIM's true meaning and application should be understood as one enabling an educational process that is integral with practice, removing the boundaries that exist between academia and professional obligations. BIM should not be seen as a utopian device leading to the renaissance of the architect as "Master Builder." Instead, it should be seen as fostering an integral environment, where architects are readily enabled to synthesize the knowledge binding science, engineering, and art—and having the digital tools at their disposal to do so. BIM as process, inherently collaborative and radically different from anything witnessed prior to it, can then lead to an even greater discussion—the enhanced valuation of architects and architecture within society. Educational environments that foster this kind of creativity and understanding will be the distinguished pioneers of a new paradigm in architectural education—separated clearly from those seeking to hold onto the past—and will play a pivotal role in developing the next generation of architects and practice.

About the Author

Paul Seletsky, Associate AIA, is the Director of Digital Design for Skidmore Owings and Merrill’s New York office. In this role, he coordinates the strategic implementation of technology as defined by Digital Design, encompassing greater understanding and utilization of Building Information Modeling as well as building the cultural foundations necessary for such change. His goal is to foster discussion on a variety of advanced software and hardware topics, leading to greater adoption of these design tools and their processes. A 1982 graduate of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, he is also the chair of the AIA NY Chapter’s Technology Committee, and served as a member of the AIA's Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) Committee from 2004 - 2006. He has been managing technology in both its operational as well as strategic capacities for the last seventeen years. He can be reached at Paul.Seletsky@som.com.

Note: The views expressed in Viewpoint articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of AECbytes. Also, no advertising or sponsorship is accepted for Viewpoint articles.