BIM Design

CHAPTER 2

THE MASTER BUILDER AND INFORMATION MODELLING

So we talk, because the experience of American beauty is inextricable from its optimal social consequence: our membership in a happy coalition of citizens who agree on what is beautiful, valuable, and just. In this we are the direct descendants of those Renaissance artists, mercantile princes, and connoisseur churchmen who spoke of beauty the way we do.

Dave Hickey, ‘American Beauty’¹

The emerging discussion of information modelling has rekindled an interest in the pre-Renaissance idea of the architect as the master builder – one who was intimately involved in the holistic process of creating a building, beginning with design and continuing through construction. This suggests, as others have implied, that the more hands-on approach of the master builder is likened to the designer using information modelling technologies. What is more interesting is that both our pre-Renaissance counterparts and designers today needed an extended field of knowledge to execute complex building projects – further suggesting a break with the architect’s representational activities of the 20th century. The introduction of perspectival drawing and the printing press in the 15th century drastically changed the design-to-construction process and the roles and relationships of the people who undertook that work. This recent and 21st-century return to a three-dimensional and model-based – albeit digital – method of designing and virtually constructing ...