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By Ken Sanders, FAIA

Paving new roads

Although BIM has yet to achieve widespread use among design firms, many new buildings realize the benefits of digitally enabled manufacturing each day. A variety of building components and subsystems are factory-built using digital processes: doors and windows, carpets and fabrics, furniture systems, mechanical equipment, elevators. Although our profession has benefited from these manufacturing innovations, most architects can neither claim credit for them nor extract much value from them.

Some architects are collaborating with manufacturers to accelerate this trend. In their fascinating book Refabricating Architecture (2004), for example, architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake describe how increasing the size of premanufactured “chunks” of buildings, and reducing the number of assembly joints between them, can help lower costs and streamline construction.

Illustration: © Mark Danielson

The key prerequisite to achieving these innovations, however, is not more digital technology. It is creating new partnerships between owners, designers, and builders; developing organizational cultures and educational programs that support them; and inventing new delivery processes to leverage them. Gehry Partners is often held up as the paragon of this approach, and rightly so: The firm collaborates directly with contractors, fabricators, and suppliers in order to realize Gehry’s unique designs, and strives to overcome the legal and institutional barriers that impede the process.

Without these fundamental changes in the culture of our profession, the value opportunity of BIM will remain out of our reach. Trying to implement BIM without first focusing on organizational transformation is like trying to drive a car on an ungraded, unpaved road: It’s a long, hard slog.

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