Its ableto built bilbao's guggenheim directly in archicad?

[Alanerniquez]

Im new at this thing of the BIM and i think is amazing switching from ancient autocad way of drawing to Archicad but i have found kind of difficult triyng to design very organic shapes and with maxon form seems more difficult so i would like to know if there is a way to design something like Gehry's designs directly from archicad.
waiting 4 your answers and tell me how you do it if u can.

[Anonymous]

Ignacio wrote:
I would argue against CAD or computers having changed anything substantial in architectural education, or the problems of architectural education.

I agree. There has been good and bad to varying degrees for centuries. The problem is not with the tools. I think the biggest problem comes from people who think of buildings as piles of stuff, ie things, to be designed rather than a complex interplay between function and form. The style of the wrapper doesn't matter much if the light and space and purpose are not successfully interwoven.

[Anonymous]

I talk regularly with teachers who are friends of mine about the effect of cad on students and we all feel that the computer in education has had a major impact on the way students learn design.

Cad is, of course, just another tool to the mature architect, but to someone just starting out it is a tool of such immense power that it too often subverts the design thought process. I recently had a conversation with an architecture department head and he felt very strongly that too many students today have never developed the ability to sketch and think.

By that I mean conceptual sketching, not necessarily the generation of specific form. I know there are those who believe one can “sketch” on the computer, but I would say it’s not the same thing. Even when I am past the conceptual phase of a job, I still find that I can often solve a problem much faster by thinking it through on a sketchpad. It may only be a minute or two of sketching before I go back to the computer, but it always surprises me how effective sketching really is. Many students completely lack that fundamental skill.

I have done fifth year design critiques at one school for 29 years and at another school for about 8 years and have seen first hand the advent of the computer and the changes it brought to the student learning process. It allows some students to accomplish things they could never do by hand. Unfortunately, for many more it becomes a crutch they use to generate fantastic forms (rendered in giant glossy ink jet prints) that are ultimately without content or meaning.

I have a feeling that many here on the forum learned design by drawing. Imagine for a moment that you simply skipped all those years of sketching and only knew the computer. Or worse yet, only ArchiCad…………….lol.

I can’t ever imagine going back to the old analog days, but I would say for young students too much cad can be a bad thing.

Ant Farm anyone?


Don Lee

[Dwight]

The main reason i have such strong feelings about blobs in CAD is that they defy how things go together. Software lets us generate form without understanding materials or fabrication. That's wrong.

A perfect example of this is the EMP in Seattle where, digitizing from paper balls and bent cardboard, a team made a 3D model, then detailed a building. Since they had such confidence in their aviation software, they ordered the skin panels pre-drilled. Problem was, as the building skin was installed over the wacky faceted curving i-beams of the structure, the accumulated bending resistance of the panels loaded the structure to the point where deflection mis-aligned panel-fastening holes. And so it goes.

Architecture school is all about ideas, and ideograms and sketches reveal ideas best.

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

But, gentlemen, you are establishing a correlation between CAD and the students' lack of intellectual ellaboration. I don't think any 'thought-provoking' or 'concept-ellaborating' or 'knowledge-imparting' lecture or comment that was there before the computer was displaced by the computer.

The first impression of course always is that the problem is the students, but the students only do what the teachers teach them or stimulate them to do. Take away the computer from them, and they would be happily producing attractive thoughtless cardboard models, or attractive thoughtless hand-drawn sketches, or attractive thoughtless gouaches, more often than not to cheers from the faculty.

I have been a teacher too, and I also check out just about every architecture school I happen to be near to, whatever country I am in. I find the complaint about the effect of the computer most often comes from old timers that never got to feel as comfortable with the computer as they are with a pen and a napkin (everybody should be comfortable, at least in the sense of 'not intimidated by', with both, and lacking that I think any comparison or evaluation is not worth a lot), and who are not aware that they themselves often tend to drool all over visually attractive hand drawn sketches or cardboard models or whatever and not care that much about anything else. Not saying this is your case Don, you have been pointing at lack of thought as the problem --the point I am trying to make is that, save for a few precious exceptions in the world, that has always been the rule in architecture schools.

Having said that, I am surprised by the fact many American architecture schools just don't teach hand drawing any more (students never receive drawing lessons, they can't make a quickie perspective sketch on a napkin). But neither do they learn technology, or architectural history, or structures, or urban design, or anything, so that even if they could draw, they would not know what to draw.

[Thomas Holm]

Don wrote:
. . . I love my computer and ArchiCad (most of the time), but I was taught how to sketch and think. . .
Don Lee

Thanks, Don. A lot of food for thought there.

I take it you mean this Ant Farm?
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/centro-andaluz-de-arte-contemp.php
The video of the House of the Century is really interesting. An LSD trip in ferrocement!

It also reminds me of Erich Mendelsohn's Einsteinturm 50 years earlier. No CAD there either.

[Anonymous]

Thomas wrote:

Don wrote:
. . . I love my computer and ArchiCad (most of the time), but I was taught how to sketch and think. . .
Don Lee

Thanks, Don. A lot of food for thought there.

I take it you mean this Ant Farm?
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/centro-andaluz-de-arte-contemp.php
The video of the House of the Century is really interesting. An LSD trip in ferrocement!

It also reminds me of Erich Mendelsohn's Einsteinturm 50 years earlier. No CAD there either.

Thomas:

Those are the guys! Watched all the videos on YouTube. I never knew the house had been completely rebuilt/restored and I guess might be again.

Great stuff and as you say, not a Rhino in sight!

Don Lee

[Thomas Holm]

Don wrote:
Those are the guys! Watched all the videos on YouTube. I never knew the house had been completely rebuilt/restored and I guess might be again.

Great stuff and as you say, not a Rhino in sight!

Don Lee

Sorry to say, as I read it the house isn't restored, the video is mostly original from the 70ties? Am I wrong?

Whatever, at that time Rhinos were only roaming Africa...

[Anonymous]

Hi Ignacio:

I agree with you completely that problems in architectural education are not caused by the computer, but I would say the inherent power of cad allows undisciplined students (and teachers) to take the easy way out. Seduced by the dark side as it were.

I do think however, when you draw a line by hand or make a simple cardboard model they exist unfinished, but with also the unlimited potential to become many things. A scaled, shadowed, rendered cad construction (even in wiggly lines) becomes a reality often precluding what might be.

My experience with teachers has been a little different than yours. Yes, there are the old timers who know are stuck in their ways and insist on only basswood models. I find more often however, that teachers not fully computer proficient, blindly embrace all things cad, so as to not appear to be old fashioned or out of date. And by computer proficient, I don't mean just knowing how to work a program, but actually designing in cad.

Having said that, I am surprised by the fact many American architecture schools just don't teach hand drawing any more (students never receive drawing lessons, they can't make a quickie perspective sketch on a napkin). But neither do they learn technology, or architectural history, or structures, or urban design, or anything, so that even if they could draw, they would not know what to draw.

Well, I can only speak to those schools of architecture that I know first hand here in California and they do teach all of the above. In fact, I know of one teacher who insists that his students do everything in both “analog” and “digital”. The workstations are set up so that the drawing table is next to the model table, which is next to the computer. At any point in the project they are meant to have sketched, built a cardboard model of and computer modeled their solution.

I know this has gone off topic a bit, but I really appreciate the exchange of ideas. Now if I only could understand Teamwork, I would be as they say "a happy camper". And bring on those blobs!

Don Lee

[Anonymous]

Don wrote:
Even when I am past the conceptual phase of a job, I still find that I can often solve a problem much faster by thinking it through on a sketchpad. It may only be a minute or two of sketching before I go back to the computer, but it always surprises me how effective sketching really is.

Me too.

But I don't presume sketching is the best way only because it is the best way for a guy like me, who started to learn to design 25 years ago.

Thanks for the thought food.

[stefan]

While I agree on the virtues of the analog sketch, I still see it as an intellectual task of researchers on Computer Aided Design to exploit the possibilities offered by software to "augment" this sketching.

To me, SketchUp already proved to many that a straightforward but highly efficient modelling application has it's rightful place inside the architect's toolbox.

As I have returned to academics after some years of practice, I still see that we are not there right now. I'm not even sure that we can be there once, but at least we can try to improve our tools.

To that extent, I have good faith in BIM combined with simulation tools (energy, cost, visualization, structural engineering). Not that they will be simple and straightforward to use in the design process for everything, but at least their treshold will lower, allowing them to be used sooner and (hopefully) deliver simulations and "what-if" evaluations on the design while it is developing, rather than as a post-design afterthought.