Following on from Of the year 2010, a look back at a year full of clouds, patents, and WebGL.
Software of the year
My pick for Software of the Year is something I don’t use very much, you probably don’t either, but it hints at what we might use in the future. It is ShapeSmith by Benjamin Nortier.
ShapeSmith can be described with all the popular buzz words: AJAX, NoSQL, three.js, open-source (on top OpenCascade), Amazon Elastic Cloud Storage and HTML5 / WebGL. In this list, the last three items are the significant jargon:
OpenSource: There are ranges of openness, from open API’s and open data formats through to complete open-source (like in ShapeSmith). Either way, all this access is making it increasingly easy for small development teams to create software only large corporations could have made a decade ago. With it comes innovation. The all encompassing software silos are slowly giving way to ecosystems of software, built in many small parts like ShapeSmith.
Cloud Computing: Cloud computing was the fabled solution to every problem this year: too complicated to compute, put it in the could; need access anywhere, in the cloud; teamwork, the cloud; global warming, clouds. Yet all the talk resulted in little more than hopeful diagrams. This is because ‘the cloud’ is far more ephemeral than people realise. Yet ShapeSmith actually operates in a cloud. There are difficulties with latency, with paying for the cloud computation and with control. But having a rack of Amazon computers crunch your geometry is a tantalising trade off.
WebGl: I wrote a post about WebGl back in May. A bit like tablets, it is a solution seeking a problem. ShapeSmith is probably is not the right problem – in the sort term WebGl will likely augment rather than replace your CAD software. But like so much of ShapeSmith, I would not be surprised if it has predicted the future.
Quote of the year
One of the most revealing quotes this year came from Daniel Piker in the Kangaroo Physics release notes:
note : regarding the planarization functions – I have been asked to draw your attention to the patents held by Evolute, Helmut Pottmann and RFR: http://www.evolute.at/technology/patents.html
In the debate that followed the majority felt Evolute was unethical, and Evolute responded essentially by telling the architectural community to pay up.
However my favourite quote this year has to be:
… use computation, but stop fucking talking about it. Your project isn’t any better because you told me it was scripted from the secret code found in the lost book of the Bible handed to you by your Merovingian great grandmother. Nor because you spent a semester producing the most intricate parametric network ever seen by man, & still ended up with three crumpled potatoes in glossy grey.
Somehow Gramazio & Kohler and Prof. Raffaello D’Andrea herded a swarm of flying robots to intelligently stack bricks. The installation is an outcome from the Flying Machine Enabled Construction project, which conjures up images of bees and Archigram and R2-D2. It is a great counterpoint to the relatively trivial and unimaginative applications of computation we have seen recently. Hopefully this level of thinking occurs more in the future, or at the very least more flying robots in the future please…
Search of the year
Periodically I check the search terms people use to discover this blog. It’s one way to find questions needing answers. So to the 41 people who came this year asking “what software does zaha hadid use?” the answer is: everything. For the five that wonder why “computational architectural design sucks”, you need to remember computational design is a technique and the outcome is a reflection of your own abilities. But for the three of you who came in search of “patrick schumachers wife”, and you know who you are, I hope you put some thought into your resolutions this new year. To the rest of you, I hope you have an enjoyable break!
In cracks between the evangelical facade that cocoons parametric modelling with a blanket of positive writing, you catch glimpses of dissent. These are the things you catch people talking about in private between drinks – tall tales of unexpected work, of rebuilding the model, of mistakes and incompetence. As significant as it is, I have never seen anyone write a whole paper on it (unfortunately so much of what is important goes unstated in the rules of publishing). The following six quotes are as close as I have ever got:
David Gerber: “When the topology of a project changes the [parametric] model generally needs to be remade…” (2007, 205)
Rick Smith “A designer might say I want to move and twist this wall, but you did not foresee that move and there is no parameter to accommodate the change. It then unravels your [parametric model]. Many times you will have to start all over again.” (2007, 2)
Jane Burry: “… to edit the relational graph or remodel completely is also commonplace.” (2007, 622)
Dominik Holzer et al. “… changes required by the design team were of such a disruptive nature that the parametric model schema could not cope with them.” Part of the model was rebuilt. (2007, 639)
Robert Aish and Robert Woodbury: Parametric modelling “may require additional effort, may increase complexity of local design decisions and increases the number of items to which attention must be paid in task completion.” (2005, 151)
Mark Burry: If a critical change is made “there is no solution other than to completely disassemble the model and restart at the critical decision.” (1996, 78)
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Aish, Robert, and Robert Woodbury. 2005. Multi-level Interaction in Parametric Design. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 151-162. Berlin: Springer.
Burry, Jane. 2007. “Mindful Spaces: Computational Geometry and the Conceptual Spaces in which Designers Operate.” International Journal of Architectural Computing, 5 (4): 611-624.
Burry, Mark. 1996. “Parametric Design and the Sagrada Família.” Architectural Research Quarterly, 1 (Summer): 70-80.
Gerber, David. 2007. Parametric practices : Models for design exploration in architecture. Harvard University.
Holzer, Dominik, Richard Hough, and Mark Burry. 2007. “Parametric Design and Structural Optimisation for Early Design Exploration.” International Journal of Architectural Computing 05 (04): 625-644.
Jason Calacanis, a technology entrepreneur never shy of hyperbole, exclaims that:
Anyone who has an iPad — a device that did NOT exist 18 months ago — says it’s their primary consumption device or tied for their primary consumption device. (via Launch)
When I stopped to consider where I consume media – like others Calacanis interviewed – the answer is: primarily on my iPad. But consumption doesn’t matter for those of us looking for a tax write-off on our Christmas present to ourselves work related expense. The all important question is whether you can do anything productive on an iPad. So a quick review of what is available for architects and where it might head:
3D Viewers
All of the major CAD companies have put out CAD viewers for the iPad.
These apps all work in much the same way, allowing you to open, view and present 3d files on the iPad. It turns out rendering geometry is a task the iPad is surprisingly good at. The controls inside Graphisoft’s BimX are probably my favorite, allowing you to walk around a building like in a computer game with an overlay of the floor-plan based on your location. One of the major hindrances to all these apps is Apple’s clunky solutions for getting content onto the iPad. Take for instance Bentley’s helpful guide for exporting models to the iPad:
Bentley doing what they do best
This particularly painful diagram from Bentley is partly because your drawings need to be exported into a special mobile format. The same is true of Graphisoft’s BimX. However, Dassault, McNeel and Autodesk use the native file format of their desktop counterparts. This makes importing files much easier but the true significance is that these companies have worked out how to port code from desktop apps to the iPad – an important first step in creating something more than a 3d viewer.
Of all the vendors, Autodesk have been the most enthusiastic about the iPad. In total they have produced 16 apps; a grab-bag of 3d viewers, drawing apps, a photo manipulation app, a clock, a game and a book. It seems Autodesk senses something is happening, but their scatter-shot approach gives the impression they are not (yet) sure of the larger vision. Nevertheless, it is exciting to see Autodesk throw their might behind speculative innovation – we are seeing it with apps and also their recent cloud efforts: Autodesk 360 & Autodesk Cloud.
Apps to create architecture
Autodesk’s experiments have produced two notable apps for creating geometric designs:
AutoCAD WS is largely a viewer for AutoCAD files but also has tools to draw circles, lines, rectangles and text. AutoCAD jockeys are not going to be rushing to produce drawings on the iPad but it is probably enough to markup changes if you are away from the computer.
123D Sculpt is a push-pull mesh tool that lets you shape an object like it is clay. The interface is suited to the iPad but the organic forms are probably only appropriate to architects of a certain ilk (Gehry).
Not my most flattering self-portrait - in 123D Sculpt
There is a smattering of other apps available, none of them particularly amazing. My favorite is Home Design 3D. It is a very basic CAD tool where in 2d you can draw walls (orthogonal only) and add windows, doors, and furniture. Once complete you can fly around a 3d rendering of your rooms. It is no Revit, but for non-architects wanting to mockup things like renovations, I would recommend it over Sketchup.
New interfaces
The CAD offerings on the iPad are currently pretty dismal, mostly because the touch interface has not found a place beside the precise, memory intensive desktop counterparts. It has taken 18 months for the iPad to be a primary consumption device but the CAD industry is moving much slower than this. On the other-hand the games industry is moving very quickly and we see games for the iPad that have architectural aspects like Touch Physics, Zen Bound, Cut the Rope, World of Goo, MineCraft and even Angry Birds (although admittedly about the destruction of architecture). These might hint at where the industry (Autodesk?) is going, as Ben Regnier asks, “why the hell don’t I get to use this at work?” (Work, mostly play)
I would love to find more apps, please post your favorites in the comments.
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