BIM Design

CHAPTER 5

THE DIGITAL STATES AND INFORMATION MODELLING

AN ITERATIVE DESIGN PROCESS

In the years prior to the more wide use of information modelling systems, many architects were drawn to the computer for digital experimentation that was afforded by three-dimensional modelling tools. This opened yet another divergence in the codification of computing with respect to architectural design – while some were content adopting managerial efficiencies to projects through these new tools; others, in effect, were creating new problems through the generation of new and novel forms with the computer. As such, these early adopters of computing in architectural design – like Greg Lynn in Los Angeles, Alejandro Zaera-Polo in London, and Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto in New York – began to redefine the authorial or creative act of designing with new tools whose broad application to architectural design had not previously been considered. The novelty of such projects as the Yokohama Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects and the Presbyterian Church of New York by a team of Lynn, Michael McInturf and Douglas Garofalo gained notoriety as new architecture using digital design techniques that promised to change what this new architecture looked like.

Interestingly, in terms of information modelling it is not what these practitioners, then in their late thirties and early forties, visually produced that is the most exciting. As more design proposals were generated using the computer, it became ...