the future of architecture

QR Codes and Micro-payments

Did you read my post on Augmented Reality and Micro-Payments? You should. It’s pretty cool. The more I think about affiliate links and micro-payments, the more I get excited about the idea. Could we test this concept in 2013? You bet we can. Here’s how. Step One - Find a client willing to do an experiment with you. It probably needs to be a commercial client, my guess is that a

Read More

Ten Years Later, summer internships aren’t what they once were

I’ve seen into the Chasm. It’s beautiful, ambitious, and not the architectural graduates of times past. Back in January I had coffee with two students from the University of Minnesota that I’m mentoring. I asked them a question, “do you have any classmates who still say ‘I can’t wait to graduate and start designing buildings!’?” The answers: “We’re not allowed to be that optimistic” and “There are people who say

Read More

Augmented Reality and Micro-payments

Sooner than you think. Much sooner than you believe possible. You’ve reached BIM IV-IV, the pinnacle of Social BIG BIM. You talk with prospective clients about the AECOU relationship. Your BIMs are integrated with the final buildings so that they are a part of the user experience. You are in the realm of augmented reality. Anyone who walks into one of your buildings can query an infinite amount of information

Read More

Who is in the BIM? AECO meet AECOU

I couldn’t fit this graph in the previous post on social BIG BIM, so it gets its own post. Which is good because I also want to ruminate on the acronym AECOU. Once we reach Social BIG BIM, IV-IV (augmented reality), the time line of the building/BIM and who is using it might look something like this: Blue is 100% in the model, Gray 0% in the model. Note 1:

Read More

Primary Benefits of BIM

This is the third part in a series about demystifying BIM. The first post Why you failed at BIM (you were impatient) looked at the struggles with BIM adoption. The second post There are Four BIM Flavors clarified the term BIM by looking at two major factors: BIG/little and social/lonely. The result of the second post was a diagram that divided BIM into four major variants. Each quadrant has a

Read More

There are Four BIM Flavors

“In the short term, we are little bimmers. In the long term, we are Big Bimmers.”  -David “Joshua” Plager, AIA The comment above was posted on LinkedIN in response to my blog post “Why you failed at BIM“. What a great sentiment. In all the back and forth discussions of what BIM means, we all pretty much agree on the concept of little bim, BIG BIM. I’m not sure if

Read More

Make the ARE Vignette Program HARDER

So I titled my post about the beta-testing of the ARE practice program “The Most Advanced 64-BIT Drafting Program“. That was a bit of a snarky, jerk comment. I am so thrilled that it is finally going 64-bit. I have heard too many horror stories from friends who took the AREs after I did. They had to go to work and use the old 32-bit machine connected to some random

Read More

You are a Dinosaur

If you are reading this you are a dinosaur. The digital natives will steal your job. But that’s okay because you won’t be qualified to do your job when they start taking responsibility from us. And I do mean us (more on that maybe tomorrow). So what are we going to do to survive? Okay dinosaurs. I’ve got a question for us. If we don’t design buildings that look like

Read More

The best designs lie ahead of us

If you’re an optimist, then you’ll have to agree that the best architecture awaits us in the future. I’m an optimist. I’m a romantic too, so I’ll always dream of and love the great buildings of our forefathers. My three favorite buildings are probably the Kimbell Art Museum, the Library at Phillips Exeter Academy (both by Louis Kahn, obviously), and the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris by Henri Labrouste.  Well they are in

Read More
Scroll to Top