I love design. But I must admit I am obsessed with production. On Friday a coworker and I went to view the Bearden Place competition entries at the University of Minnesota Urban Research and Outreach/Engagement Center. (most of the entries can be viewed here) There were some great designs, but I found myself spending more time looking for clues on how the work was produced. Where there tell-tale signs of the hand of someone we knew (it was all anonymous at the exhibit)? Were there clues to what program was used? ArchiCAD, Revit, Sketchup, Chief Architect, something else? Cars. There are certain stock cars that show up regularly in renderings. There are definitely ArchiCAD cars and Sketchup cars. And trees. And people. Rendering styles too. There are some powerful default rendering styles in all these programs. But some of them (I’m looking at you Sketchup) just scream that they are of a certain program. To an extent we can get away with this forced style with clients. But I don’t think this is good practice. The brand of color pencil or water color paint shouldn’t dictate the style of a rendering, so why do we let computer programs? Photoshop is no less a culprit. I love what Photoshop can do. How a skilled user can turn any image into a masterpiece. But many of us, perhaps because we all know how a safe, good photoshoped image looks, don’t stray from that accepted standard. Translucent Scalies don’t excite me anymore.

Another example. I can’t find the original thread, but there was a discussion on one of the BIM groups I follow on LinkedIn. The conversation went like this “in BIM programs our drawings look different. Our coworkers and clients need to adjust to this.” The general tone of this conversation was that BIM output was inferior to similar output done in 2D or by hand. Let’s not settle for that. I’ve been blessed with coworkers who don’t care about or understand those arguments. Independent of the production method we need to create beautiful drawings. And a beauty that is not beholden by the forced style of the program. Just like in our hand drawings, we let our individual aesthetic shine not only in our designs but in how we design and how we represent it.

I’ve talked about this a couple of times in the Minnesota ArchiCAD Usergroup (MNAUG). How can we leverage the capabilities of ArchiCAD / BIM while maintaining the aesthetic we prefer for our drawings? This will be one of the major themes of this blog. But before we go in depth into the various ways to achieve this, there are some tangential concepts that should be highlighted as well. The next blog post will talk about one of these: strategies for learning ArchiCAD.