BIM Proto-Buldings

John Tobin has written a wonderful article discussing the old and new uses of BIM building creation. His whole article boils down to using the software to not mimic or describe a building, but to actually build a digital building. It's a very compelling argument as many of our document discrepancies can be realized by creating building documents not just in 2D space but in real-time 3D space.

Buildings are intensely complicated, and so immense, that the most reliable way to convey design intent has been to rely on drafted views which try to describe their configuration. As a result, the architect’s work has traditionally become an exercise on paper trying to represent something that has a different, more physical reality.

Though many designers continue to use BIM to produce drawings—and a recent industry survey (Top Criteria for BIM Solutions: AECbytes Survey Results, Oct. 2007) favored that issue over several others—this is probably a transitional phase for BIM. We would be better served to look beyond using BIM merely as a more powerful representation tool, and instead to treat the models we create as proto-buildings.