The Drawings are dead, long live the Drawings!
BIM workflows won't eliminate drawings: they will reshape our expectations of what drawings are for and who creates them
Welcome back to A Bicycle for Design, a newsletter that explores how architectural and engineering design is being transformed by software and computers!
A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law (an architect) got a request from a contractor: "Could you change the font on your drawings?" He politely turned down the request. I was fascinated by this exchange, because it illuminates how our expectations of architectural drawings have changed and sheds light what changes are still to come.
The first thing that struck me is that I cannot imagine that a contractor would ever make this request back in the day of hand-drawn plans. Changing the font would mean re-drawing the entire set - who would ask for that?
Secondly, changing the font is technically straightforward - it's just a setting in the software. The biggest issue would be making sure the text still flows nicely - how times have changed!!
Thirdly, since the drawings are still the formal communication channel for the project, this change would affect not only the contractor, but also the other designers, building officials, owners, etc... This is the fundamental reason why my brother-in-law turned down the request: despite working in Revit, a change to the font in the drawings still triggers the same amount of document control paperwork as a fundamental change in the design.
Step by step
When a design is documented in a drawing, there is no separation between the design decisions themselves, and the means by which they are presented. Whoever creates the data (designs the building) decides how the data is presents (creates the drawings).
Now that we are storing our designs as 3D datasets (BIM), the work of creating the data (modelling) is separate from the work of laying out drawings. Despite this, if the design is formally communicated via drawings, then the same person or team is still responsible for both jobs: the architect creates both the architectural model and the architectural drawings; each engineering discipline produces both a model and a drawing set.
If data and visualization are really different, we have an opportunity for the viewer of the data to own its presentation. What if architects and engineers only created working plans for them to see their model as they needed to see it? If they submit a raw model, the building officials and contractors can create or specify their own plans and sections from the submitted model!
Seeds of Change
The idea that everyone can create their own drawings (and still be coordinated!) may seem like a radical change, but the seeds of this change are all around us.
Shop drawings
A shop drawing is an independent set of drawings that (in theory!) show the exact same information as the structural steel plans, with a) added information and b) a different presentation of that information. It is a small step from issuing structural drawings and then producing shop drawings to issuing a structural model and then producing shop drawings.
I did this a few years back for a small platform with a complex geometry: we issued a Tekla Structures model, which the steel fabricator then refined and used to produce the shop drawings.
Revit
When the members of a team are all working in the same Revit file, one convention is for each person to have their own 3D view. In this view, they can set up the visualization as they want, draw their own section boxes and measure dimensions that they need without cluttering up everyone else's plans. There is no fundamental technical reason why this way of working cannot be extended beyond the bounds of a single discipline to the wider construction team.
Another pattern is to have several sets of plans in a Revit model: working views, coordination views and the formal drawing views. The working views are set up for the architects, engineers and other modellers to see the information they need to work efficiently. The coordination views overlay different team's models to understand how they fit together. The formal drawing views are the means of delivering this information to the builders and permitting authorities. Look how small the step is: keep the working and coordination views, but instead of issuing the formal drawings, just issue the model data, and let everyone who uses it make their own working views!
When it comes to automation, we have clear expectations about the division between data and drawings. A common complaint about interoperability tools is that when they update data in a Revit model, all the tags disappear in the drawings. When we are updating the data in a BIM model, we expect the update to not mess up the drawings! (As an aside, the team I lead has worked hard to get this behaviour right in the Speckle connector for GSA)
SketchUp and LayOut
SketchUp makes the division between modelling and drawing production explicit: you create and modify models in SketchUp and then you switch to a completely different package, Layout, to create your drawings.
One advantage to this split is that you cannot edit the model from LayOut. If a SketchUp model is issued to another team who then lays out drawings in LayOut, it is less likely that they have snuck in design changes in the process!
A new era for blueprints
BIM, or data-centric, workflows will not eliminate drawings. As 3D datasets take up the burden of communicating designs accurately and unambiguously, drawings will be free to help each person best comprehend the design - even if that just means picking their favourite font!