The Design and Construction industry has fallen behind all other industries except agriculture in its investment in and implementation of technology. (Greg Gidez, AIA, Project Delivery Community)
On the second Friday in January the AIA Committee for
Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) brought technology industry leaders and architects together at the AIA's national headquarter in DC to discuss the state of architects and technology. The AIA board room with its circular seating arrangement in the modern annex to the historic Octagon building, a bit more than a stone throw from the White House, was a great space to ponder architects and technology and where to go from here.
The idea was that the various AIA "Knowledge Communities" (KC) would present their issues with technology to the Technology KC and the experts sitting in the round. I represented the Regional and Urban Design KC to address building information modeling on the city scale.
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The chair of the Committee on Design, one of the KC groups, received chuckles when he asserted that he wasn't a Luddite but noted that technology greatly helps "architects to spend too much time making bad ideas look good". He compared in two slides Gehry's
Los Angeles concert hall with
Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie and observed dryly that Scharoun had created his hall and excellent acoustics all by handcraft. Here it was again, not even an hour into the daylong gathering, this lingering doubt if computer aided design (and drafting, known as CAD-D in the industry) would kill the crafts of drafting and designing. The urgency of this question diminishes in parallel with number of of architects who were trained as architects long before the onset of CAD.
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