Future trends

Written by Martyn Day

Published Wed 16 Jul 2008

Phil Bernstein has been a practicing architect working on major projects around the world, lecturing at Yale University and for the last eight years has helped lead Autodesk’s AEC division where he is the VP of AEC Industry Strategy and Relations.

Martyn Day: Much has been talked about the move from 2D drawing to BIM. What are the driving factors?

Phil Bernstein: I think there are three categories of motivation, although not are all shared by all our customers but a combination of each.

One is the philosophical need to look for ways of improving things, the search for better tools. Secondly there’s a generational interest, with groups of young architects and engineers, who are digitally more capable and don’t have the same set of worries as their older bosses. And the third reason is there are enough innovative firms out there trying BIM, that here in the USA, the discussion is over, as to whether it’s a good idea or not, as they know their competitors are using it.

McGraw Hill published an analysis of a market survey they had at the start of the year where 50% of the firms said they were going to have BIM in place and implemented by the end of 2009.

Martyn Day: Are the professional and legal institutions keeping up to date with how BIM changes the contractual and process changes that a BIM methodology demands?

Phil Bernstein: It’s important to understand that contracts are manifestations of defined business processes. I can see two things happening at the moment. We have the private owners experimenting with integrated delivery methodologies and inventing their own processes and writing their own contracts. For example there’s an $800 million hospital under construction in San Francisco by a large healthcare client and they opted for an integrated project delivery scenario and wrote their own contracts that described their business process. Another example is Autodesk, we have two small office projects underway one in California, one in Massachusetts where we wrote our own contract and hired our own integrated design and construction teams and just wrote the contracts ourselves.

The other category is that the professional associations have issued new manifestos or contract models. The Association of General Contractors here in the USA, last year published a series of integrated practice documents (IPD) and the AIA has just published a set of IPD documents. We are also starting to see this ground swell of conferences, journal articles covering the implications and experiences of working this way. The American College of Construction Lawyers now has a BIM forum, the insurance industry has also formed a consortium. The machine is starting to work now; There’s a lot of IPD stuff going on.

Martyn Day: In the early days, much was said that adopting BIM puts the architect back at the heart of the process. Has this transpired or has BIM been adopted more in design/build firms? If not, is the opportunity still there?

Phil Bernstein: I think the jury is still out on that one. We don’t know ultimately how these things are going to work. I will say the question has really changed as in the BIM-based integrated project models, the construct requires a high degree of collaboration and it’s also one of holding the various constituents of the process, the owner, the designer and the constructor jointly responsible for positive outcomes and so the question of ‘Who’s going to be in control of the process?’ is really not all that interesting in these deeply integrated projects. It’s about making decisions collaboratively, there’s an implicit understanding on who leads which part of the process. Nobody is wrestling for control because everyone wants to get the job done, as that’s the only way they are going to make any money.

Martyn Day: Looking at the development work, release to release, comparing AutoCAD Architecture and the Revit platform, it seems that there has been a marked change in the focus of AutoCAD Architecture (formerly ADT). Could you define the future development directions of AutoCAD Architecture and Revit?

Phil Bernstein: We don’t believe that draughting is going to go away in the foreseeable future and we believe there will be a substantial number of our customers who will continue to want a very powerful draughting platform and that’s what AutoCAD Architecture is. We have reached the point where we believe it’s right to separate the functionality and the purpose of those two platforms. We are, of course, still working on AutoCAD Architecture, it still gets a fresh yearly release but its primary focus is for people that need the best draughting platform.

Modelling and the extension of BIM will all be focused on Revit, its relationship to adjacent modeling disciplines and relationship with analytical platforms such as Green Building Studio and Robobat. Over the long term we think it’s pretty clear that everyone will migrate to a modeling platform but in the meantime we need to make sure that our customers have the tools that they need.

Martyn Day: Autodesk’s AEC solutions’ product suite is expanding rapidly, with much more in the pipeline. Could you describe the breadth of mission for the AEC division and explain the grouping of the products.

Phil Bernstein: The products are now organsied in three distinct categories. There are tools that are there for the creation of design data–AutoCAD, Revit, Civil3D. The second band of products are the analysis tools–Green Building Studio, the Structural Analysis from Robobat, NavisWorks etc. and the third category is about managing and delivering project data throughout the enterprise–Buzzsaw, Constructware, DWF. So we will continue to emphasize the portfolio in all three categories.

In the coming years there will be a strong emphasis on analysis because we feel that’s where the value proposition of the modeling tools lies, especially in sustainability, cost estimating etc. We will encourage partners to develop in that area and we will also build and or buy them.

The other dimension of the matrix is that we are really trying to emphasize is the bigger view, covering the entire lifecycle or continuum from architecture, engineering, construction, facilities management. When we are talking about BIM we are talking about the whole process, different tools for different people, should that be the Revit platform, Civil3D, NavisWorks or any other tool.

Martyn Day: Integration of the products seems key to your success. What levels of interoperability can customers expect in the latest releases and looking forward?

Phil Bernstein: We subscribe to the theory that you use the best interoperability strategy that suits the job at hand, whether it be between our products, our partner products or with products from other companies. There is not one solution that works across the whole spectrum; no single lowest common denominator.

For example there are certain instances where we think IFCs (Industry Foundations Classes) work pretty well and we keep up with the certification of our IFC translators. There are other situations where we think DWG or DGN will be the right solution, or XML. The problem is too subtle to be solved by one solution.

Martyn Day: Generative and expressive forms-based design Is getting a lot of press and many leading architects appear to be exploring new 3D products. Autodesk recently recruited Dr. Robert Aish from Bentley, who had been at the forefront of their Generative Components initiative. What are your thoughts on this trend and what kinds of technologies is Autodesk investigating?

Phil Bernstein: We are not interested in Dr. Aish (ex- Chief Scientist of Bentley Systems, father of Bentley’s Generative Component technology) rapidly replicating Generative Components. We have asked him to study what might be possible, given the array of potential technologies that Autodesk has in our portfolio. What we are calling Design Computation (Bentley uses the term Generative Components) is going to be a central concept in the use of Digital Modelling tools going forward and he has been given the opportunity to rethink the problem with the kind of resources we can make available to him.

The question being asked is moving beyond the scripted generation of provocative shapes to the scripted generation of building design solutions themselves. Can we design a technology that would allow that to happen in an intelligent way? We are not in a huge rush, as we really want to get it right, so it may be some time before we get an actual product out there. But in the meantime we have lots of other science experiments going on. We just sponsored a design studio at Yale that was taught by Greg Lynn and Mark Gage. We gave access to the entire portfolio of our products–the Alias tools, Mud Box, Maya. It was surprising to see just as much enthusiasm for products like Mudbox, as there was running custom scripts in Maya.

It’s not unusual for one of my students to graduate and be very capable with Maya, Max, AutoCAD, Revit and six different packages that do digital fabrication. If I walked into any office and grabbed any 40 year old and asked the same question, they would say they were good at Excel and used to be decent at AutoCAD

Phil Bernstein, Autodesk’s VP of AEC Industry Strategy and Relations

Martyn Day: Architectural students in universities seem to use a wide range of tools to create some outlandish forms for their projects. Have the CAD tools and materials available today liberated architectural design or are we in some way thinking differently about design?

Phil Bernstein: I actually think we do have a generation approaching problems differently because of the tools that are available. It’s not at all unusual for one of my students to graduate from Yale and be very capable with Maya, Max, AutoCAD, Revit and six different packages that do digital fabrication. If I walked into any office and grabbed any 40 year old and asked the same question, they would say they were good at Excel and used to be decent at AutoCAD. So there is this generational gap that creates a willingness to explore a different set of tools and solutions. If you combine that with the aesthetic possibilities that these tools create, that’s why you are seeing this happening in Universities.

Look at Zaha Hadid’s work as an example, it has the underlying set of issues she was interested in when she started out as a painter. You have this interesting harmonic convergence of certain aesthetic priorities that she brings to the problem. So, much more functional tools that can explore the problems in three dimensions and now actually get them built, together with a generation of young architects that can actually fly these products.

Martyn Day: Autodesk has made some very constructive moves to highlight Green Building and Environmental issues. What tools are available now from Autodesk to assist designers and what kinds of technologies do you envisage Autodesk developing?

Phil Bernstein: We believe that BIM is a fundamental platform for sustainable design, because it’s the best way to reason about a building’s characteristics. What we need to do is augment both the capabilities of the platform and the available analytical tools to make that possible. We are focusing on the most important problems and right now those are energy analysis and lighting. We have made a couple of acquisitions that concern the energy part of the equation and you will see continued enhancement of the platform to handle the digital data required for analysis and continued augmentation of various kinds of analysis tools, you probably haven’t seen the end of various acquisitions,

If you check out the video on Autodesk.com about our technology concept for a sustainability analysis dashboard (www.autodesk.com/greenresearch), it demonstrates the underlying theory we are exploring – the possibility of a way of simultaneously designing and interacting with analysis. We also believe that there is an opportunity to do automated validation, so you know where you are in relation to your chosen certification process, needs to come forward in the analysis process.

The problem is we can’t move too quickly on this as the standards haven’t settled in yet and they are moving in all kinds of dimensions. Right now we are wrestling with energy but if you had asked me what order I would have done this development work three years ago, I would have said energy, daylight, fresh water, air quality, but within the last year it has become apparent that the next big thing is carbon. So we are going to have to figure that out and stay light on our feet. It’s going to take a while.

Martyn Day: CAD used to be seen as a replacement to the drawing board, clearly with the powerful tools available now, we have the option to move away from mere documentation. What excites you the most about what you can provide to the AEC industry?

Phil Bernstein: I can see, in the distance, an approach where some combination of the vectors of technology–large-scale interactive displays, 3D printing and digital fabrication, infinite computing power, lots of storage, combined with an environment that, for lack of a better word, is visceral because you are not trying to manifest some abstraction that’s in your head, you can make a model something digitally and understand it and manipulate and reason about it, before you construct it.

Image courtesy of Lorenzo Marass, Greg Lynn Studio, Yale School of Architecture