Skip to main content

The future of CAAD? Or at least my personal take on it

CAAD is not dead. But the word "Computer Aided Architectural Design" has been used for so many things, that it is hard to not have some kind of preoccupation with the meaning of it. While BIM is currently one of the most interesting approaches, it still is only a subpart of CAAD. Just like parametric design or semantic web can fit into it. But what I really wanted to share with you is a wish list for the future of CAAD.

  • Let us choose any modeling approach and mix them in the amount we want
    • Direct modeling, such as in SketchUp
    • Parametric Modeling, with support for coding and graphical creation/editing, such as in Grasshopper or (to some extent) in Revit
    • Start from measurements, e.g. pointclouds, surveyors data, geo-information, photographs...
    • 2D drafting if you want
  • Let us work on ANY design phase and on ANY scale level in the order we want
    • in short (well, I did a PhD on that): we want to be able to elaborate rough models, but at the same time to be able to look at technical details and go back to the Master plan when we want. Ensure all information is tied and synchronized on all levels.
    • proper approach to define design variants, design phases (programming-sketch-preliminary-construction-management-end-of-life), building phases (existing-demolish-new phases)
  • Everything fits into a BIM workflow
    • objects have semantical meaning
      • a wall is not a scaled Cube with a Boolean subtracted void
      • space are real design objects, not just some attribute or fill. You can model a whole design just with spaces and define enclosing physical elements later, if you want
      • don't limit is to only vertical walls and only horizontal floors. If I want freeform geometry, still ensure that I can embed semantical meaning to it
    • design intent is captured and kept, e.g. relationships between elements are embedded
    • all partners can collaborate on the project model, e.g. with BIM servers
    • No need to ever create a 2D drawing by hand anymore
    • all calculations, simulations, evaluations can be done directly from the information in the building model
  • work directly in Open formats, such as IFC
    • make a DWG or PDF only as output for people needing that
    • reference other formats as underlay/overlay - always up-to-date

Beware, I'm not saying that all of this should be part of a single application or run by a single developer. Let competition exist, give us choice but make everything fit into our workflow. E.g. let people chose a modeling system and combine it with another rendering system and tie it to another simulation system and still collaborate with others who made different choices.

Utopic? Probably. But I'm allowed to dream.

Comments

  1. Good post...CAAD has a long way to go go.. and its increasing popularity in Architectural CAD services is not going to lower down in near future.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You forgot the "computer system running inside a warp bubble" that would allow all this to work in real time too.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 9 - using IfcConvert)

This is part 9 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss the IfcConvert utility from the IfcOpenShell Open Source IFC Library to preprocess an IFC model for integration with Unity. This is (finally?) again a coding post, with some scripts which are shared to build upon. Conversion of IFC into Unity-friendly formats The strategy with this approach is that you preprocess the IFC-file into more manageable formats for Unity integration. Most Web-platforms do some sort of pre-processing anyway, so what you see in your browsers is almost never an IFC-file, but an optimised Mesh-based geometric representation. However, it wouldn’t be BIM-related if we’d limit ourselves to the geometry, so we will parse the model information as well, albeit using another, pre-processed file. IFC to Wavefront OBJ I used a test IFC-model and used the IfcConvert-utility converted it into OBJ en XML formats. The default way to use it is very simple:

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 8 - Strategies to tackle IFC)

This is part 8 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss IFC as a transfer format towards Unity. As with the previous post, this is not a coding post, although hints and examples are provided. Open BIM and IFC Everybody who ever met me or heard me present on a conference or BIM-lecture will not be surprised to hear that I’m a strong believer in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open standard, with already two versions published as an ISO standard, being IFC2x2 and IFC4 (but surprisingly not IFC2x3 which is widely used). In the ideal world, this would be the format to use to transfer BIM data into another environment, such as Unity. So what are our options? Looking in the Unity Asset Store Assimp is a library which supports multiple formats, including IFC. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/trilib-unity-model-loader-package-91777   I did a few attempts, but alas without any success. It is possib