Architect: The Evolving Story of a Profession by Eleanor Jolliffe;Paul Crosby; & Paul Crosby

Author:Eleanor Jolliffe;Paul Crosby; & Paul Crosby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

From the pencil to the parametric – the rise of computing

One of the other most significant changes to the architect’s daily practice has been the almost exponential growth of drawing technology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s architectural drawing technology was more or less as it had been for the preceding centuries, if not millennia. Bob Allies and Graham Morrison both remember offices full of drawing boards when they started practising, recounting how the practice’s partners would go around after they had gone home, lifting dust sheets and leaving notes on their drawings and details.40 Following this was the entire basement room that was given over to the first computer in YRM’s offices in the late 1970s. YRM seems to have been at the forefront of this new technology, as it was not until the introduction of personal computers in the 1980s that computer-aided design (CAD) became affordable for architects more broadly.

Figure 6.4 Early computing at the John S Bonnington Partnership. CAD facilitated duplication of details, the representation of very large buildings digitally at full scale, and easier modification of drawings and details, as well as allowing multiple people to work on the same project at once. By the 1990s it had all but replaced hand drawing in architectural offices.41 In the late 1990s three-dimensional digital technology began to bring about another change in drawing methods, allowing new ways for architects to represent their design and to work more collaboratively with the design and construction teams with the introduction of building information modelling (BIM).42 BIM allowed buildings to be ‘built’ digitally in three dimensions for the first time, changing the way architecture is conceived and designed.

Figure 6.5 Early building information modelling (BIM), 1997. With each leap in technology architects’ workflows changed – first to a faster, less tangible workflow and later to a three-dimensions-first approach. These changes in technology can be seen in some of the architecture of the period as architects come to terms with the opportunities and limitations of the software. On the one hand, the three-dimensional parametric curving forms so beloved of Zaha Hadid Architects, UN Studio and Frank Gehry, among others, were constructable and fully draw-able for the first time. On the other hand, most architects have an anecdotal story of a building – usually someone else’s – that looks or is constructed a certain way ‘because I couldn’t work out how to do it the “normal” way in BIM’.

There are some who mourn the distance that increasingly digitised drawing puts between the architect and their drawings, and others who simply marvel at the ability of software to allow them to design, build and sequence construction without leaving their desk, while collaborating with people anywhere in the world. Software has also contributed to the increasing size of the average architectural practice. As running software has become essential to architectural practice, so has the entry cost of beginning a practice; software licences are considerably more expensive than paper and pens, and the creeping monopoly of the biggest software providers makes it difficult to seek alternative solutions.

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