Digital technology has been embraced by all kinds of industries and professions, sometimes for its role in creating tangible substances and material, and in other cases for its ability to help us to work on ideas. With architecture it is largely the latter, because architecture is a world of ideas in which some of the bright ones need to be explored in theory and “mocked up” before they can be brought to reality.
While the sight of a physical scale model of a housing development can still give us a little thrill because it enables us to see what the finished product will look like, making one of these from cardboard and wood is rather outdated now.
We are now in the era of the digital device and with it the acronym, with BIM (building information modelling) offering 3D digital representations which can not only give potential customers a realistic idea of what they would be spending their money on, but can help architecture firms, engineers and builders to collaborate, with the progress of one perhaps triggering a breakthrough for another.
When we are trying to predict how materials and methods of construction will combine to influence the building’s performance over its lifetime – and indeed what its lifespan will be – data from one aspect can be used to increase one professional’s understanding of another.
CAD: Why This Crops up in Architects’ Publicity so Often
CAD stands for computer-aided design, and no expression of an architect’s ability seems to be complete without it now. Whether it be for commercial architecture, or for architect designed homes in Melbourne – it enables someone designing a building or part of a building to try out shapes and calculate structural stresses and efficiency so that the outcome is known in advance, rather than learned through bitter experience somewhere down the line. So, it’s not all experimenting with attractive layouts for cosmetic purposes; it’s about health and safety and practicality too.
3D Printing: Deceptively Simple
3D printing is a concept that some people find hard to grasp because it sounds like the kind of printing we are accustomed to, in which an item – usually a sheet of paper – comes out of our machine fully formed. In fact, what has been going on within the printer is inks or toners of different colours being applied one on top of the other. With 3D printing one layer at a time is applied outside the machine so that a three-dimensional object is created gradually.
In fact, as with so many things, we don’t really need to understand how something happens; we just need to know that it does happen and enjoy the result.
3D printing produces scale models of parts used in the construction of a building and is increasingly being used to make the parts themselves, the actual full-size items used in building.
AI’s Role in All This
Artificial intelligence is now the character you can’t keep out of any movie, and in this case it can be used in conjunction with data analysis to plan the environmental aspects of a project. It can take into account the density of the population, the volume of traffic that will be in the area and other factors to help create favourable conditions as defined by current ecological thinking.
The Ultimate Goal of all This Technology
In a construction project the goal used to be to produce a building that did the job in terms of providing four walls and a roof within which a certain number of people can live or work. That is no longer enough, and the technology available to a modern architectural practice such as BY Projects Architecture can make the building more functional, for more sustainable architecture, more efficient and less harmful to the surrounding area.
