Peeking into the toolkit of a digital designer you’ll find an unruly mess of apps and code, a reflection of the rapid changes now taking place in the field. From the beginning of the digital boom SOM, the architecture firm, has witnessed this development, not as a mere bystander, but as a creative partner. As early as the 1980s, the firm has been collaborating with digital specialists like IBM; back then, info modeling options were sparse and keeping up-to-date with innovations typically involved updating your AutoCAD. Fast-forward to the present, and the floodgates have been released.

Kids are now writing their own code for school projects and the position of ‘programmer’ in archi-firms has been virtually absorbed by the designers themselves. In essence, the barrier for entry into developer circles is almost zero. SOM, now in collaboration with CASE (a building information modeling consultancy based in New York City), are now faced with the question: “Why are we inventing tools that already exist?”

This collaboration has given birth to a new interface, AEC-APPS, described as “part Wikipedia, part GitHub,” which will create a library of digital tools for both users and makers alike. Additionally, there is also a strong social component that makes it easier to find the perfect tool, and begins to outline the collaborative mentality among the BIM community, much like that of contemporary programmers. Through crowd sourcing from members, users not only stay informed but also feed a community voice that, if loud enough, could sway software vendors to the demand of the users.

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Architecture is dominated by software, from pre-concept to construction administration. This is doubly so with sustainability – only with the advent of whole building simulation and building information modeling (BIM) could energy modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and daylight analysis be rigorously forecasted. These predictive simulations provide the necessary data to determine everything from indoor comfort to energy cost savings to potential glare on computer screens Yet, it seems that architecture is falling short as new applications and devices are created everyday. Is architecture able to embrace this change fast enough to advance the future of building design, or will it lag behind?

Image courtesy of Chambers Design

If you don’t know what Grasshopper is (or think it’s a reference to Kwai Chang Caine), you are already in the wastelands of the digital age. It is one of the leading factors of Architecture 3.0, the second computational revolution for building design. This new phase is shortening the design process from months to days , and allowing a new generation to envision, design, and execute major projects with a single laptop.

The era of hand drawing lasted for thousands of years, until the late 1980’s. That was Architecture 1.0. In the early 1990’s, AutoCAD and MicroStation shepherded in Architecture 2.0, the first computer-based upheaval in architecture. Truth be told, the first CAD programs weren’t much more than hand drafting with a mouse. Around this time is when the history of energy modeling began too. The first serious energy analysis tool was DOE-2. It was the transitioning point from having to calculate the sizes of HVAC equipment by hand to allowing for complex weather data to be integrated into the calculations. DOE-2 is still used, and is a favorite platform for many mechanical engineers, but it isn’t very user friendly or easy to learn. You have to be a mechanical engineer to even turn it on.

Image courtesy of Chambers Design

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I’ve always liked to build stuff. When I was a kid, I had something going at all times. Tree forts, go-carts, lots of projects that were more or less useful. In my formative years, I worked as a carpenter and builder with the happy result of getting paid for doing what I loved. Upon entering the profession of architecture, with the requisite reduction in compensation, I remained involved in the construction industry. I created, collaborated, and administered construction. But I did not build stuff.

This is changing.

As a partner in LMN, a 100-person architecture office in Seattle, I’ve been fortunate to take part in transforming our practice, a transformation that has broader implications for our entire profession. Innovations in design technology are changing the way we work. In the first posting of this series, George described how LMN was Re-Upping on Design Technology by starting Tech Studio in 2009. While the decision to start Tech Studio was borne out of opportunity, the business case for it has proven to be sound as our work progressed and our skills got sharper.

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When the new book, BIM in Academia, published recently by the Yale School of Architecture, landed on my desk, I immediately thought of engaging Phil Bernstein (co-editor with Peggy Deemer), in a conversation about how technology is reshaping architecture pedagogy. Full disclosure: Phil, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, is also a vice president at Autodesk, the software giant whose Revit program is a key player in switching the architecture and construction industries to BIM. Then I remembered one of my visits to Phil’s practice class at Yale where students are masters at ferreting out venal conflicts of interest, and knowing Phil’s commitment to advancing the skills of the architecture profession, I launched confidently into my interview. Here we talk about the current tensions in academia, the potential for change, and the ever-hovering economic recession that’s taken a huge toll on the profession.

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An upbeat article in a 2008 architectural magazine featured chirpy stories of enterprising young architects who, unable to find positions in their chosen profession turned to alternative professions.  Now, twenty months on, it’s doubtful they’ll ever come back. Many economists predict a slow, plodding recovery beginning in the third quarter of 2011. Others are less sanguine. In either case, the durability of the present recession will elongate the period in which young graduate architects leave the profession and inevitably reduce the number of young people choosing an architectural education in the first place. One has to ask, how will this influence the practice of architecture?

The breathtaking rapidity of the 2008 economic deceleration and the collapse of credit distinguish it from its predecessors in a ways that have made an even greater impact on architects than previous recessions. The job board Simplyhired.com tracked the loss of architecture jobs when the recession hit, logging a sharp decrease of 11% from March 2007 to September 2008. Architecture firms had staffs totaling about 221,000 people that summer, which by the summer of 2010 had dropped to 167,000.  Naturally, such statistic hits recent graduates hardest.  

In the current downturn, national unemployment hovers just below 10%, yet in April 2009 the Boston Society of Architects estimated an unemployment rate among local architects of between 30% and 50%. To put it in stark terms, the unemployment rate among architects in Boston is as much as twice the national level during the Great Depression and likely to get worse. The same is true in other cities. One obvious reason for the wildly disproportionate impact upon architects this time is the dependence of building on financing, the machinery of which has seized.

Just as the long recession of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s decimated an age cohort in the practice of architecture, we should anticipate an absence of working architects in graduating classes of 2008 through 2010 and probably beyond.  This one will be even longer.  The reduction in the number of new architects entering – and working architects leaving – the field will be exacerbated by the increased difficulty and expense of becoming licensed to practice architecture and the burdens of maintaining licensure that did not exist in the 1970s and were only beginning in the 1990s. Read more…

“Trumbull” (left) and “Gilman,” two of the canned magazine templates now sold by Ready Media

How should publication designers greet the news yesterday that Roger Black—the magazine design (and redesign) guru who’s had his hands on Rolling Stone, Newsweek, New York, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, and about a zillion other titles over the years—has launched a new venture called Ready-Media to provide “outstanding media templates for both print and web-based formats” to publishers “at a fraction of the cost”? Several commenters on the Society of Publication Designers’ Grids blog were understandably displeased by what they saw as yet another nail in the pub-design coffin:

What a huge setback for designers and magazine makers.

You’ve got to be kidding. Paint by numbers for magazine design?

Working at a city/regional magazine and seeing the ever reducing budget & staff, this sends a shiver down my spine.

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A computer-generated rotation of the atrium at 41 Cooper Square

The moment people start talking about “paradigm shifts” in any profession, you can be sure there’s some big, disturbing change on its way. One thing was clear at last night’s “Shifting Paradigms: Design in Transition” event at the Center for Architecture, in New York: the digital age is about to hit architecture on the head with a knuckle duster. The proliferation of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software has already changed the way architects communicate with builders and clients; now it may force design professionals to find new ways to validate their very existence. Read more…