Our friends at Arup Connect spoke with Matt Williams, a leader of the façade engineering group in Arup’s Americas region and one serious sketcher, about the role of sketching in the digital age. The following interview, originally titled "To Sketch or Not to Sketch," discusses how sketching enables communication and how our over-reliance on technology isn't really as efficient as we may think.
One of the things we’ve been trying to develop in the façades group is people who can relate to the architect, developing and responding to the key architectural requirements. Having come from an architectural background myself, historically there seems to be a bit of a conflict, if that’s the right word, between architects and engineers. There shouldn’t be, though. Everyone wants the same thing at the end of the day: a successful project.
Read the rest of the interview, after the break...
Having architects on the façades team helps to break down some of those barriers. When I originally joined Arup in London, maybe 30% of the people in the façades group were architects. In the US, our group is now approximately 50% architects who specialize in the building skin. This creates an integrated multidisciplinary practice in its own right, alongside building envelope physicists, structural engineers, and industry specialists.
We’ve been trying to develop that link between the engineering and the architecture, so we sketch in meetings to get a better sense of what the architect wants. If you go to the meeting and just nod and say, “Yes, yes, I understand,” I think some architects feel that you’re just becoming a draftsman for them, but obviously with more technical rigor. When you sketch in meetings, you’re actively providing feedback on the ideas presented and helping to develop new ones. We can optioneer a lot more quickly by drawing during meetings because we can put different solutions on the table. And if you’ve got other people in the meeting that don’t understand technical 2D or 3D drawings and models, sketches are a good way of communicating.
Also, Arup is a global community, so I’ve been fortunate to work on projects everywhere from Israel to China to Russia. You can communicate with sketches even if you can’t speak the same language.
How has the rise of BIM affected this?
BIM is hugely important to the work that Arup does, and to the construction industry in general, particularly in relation to documentation and delivery. However, I think there’s sometimes an overreliance on CAD and 3D, particularly in the early phases of projects. Because of the BIM expectation, people seem to jump into computer modeling really, really quickly. If you jump into the CAD and the BIM too early and then have to go back and make lots of changes, that’s really time-consuming and doesn’t necessarily help you understand how things go together.
I think we should look at our early-phase input to become more efficient and leaner in the way that we deliver our work. I still think there’s a place for drawing, it’s just a matter of understanding how far you can take it. In a previous life I managed to get away without doing CAD details, producing bid documents by hand. That’s probably changed. Now we probably take it up to 50% DD, maybe 100% DD if the architect is happy. With CDs we’re probably moving things into CAD, and possibly three-dimensional modeling as well.
It’s very difficult to incorporate the level of detail that you can see in these sketches into a 3D Revit model, for example. Revit models cannot handle that amount of information. They break down into sort of blocks. You either end up with a model that is 500MB and very slow or with just a series of blocks.
We never put that level of detail into a model anyway. We are fortunate in that a lot of the industry still delivers fabrication drawings in two dimensions. I think with structural engineering, and with the mechanical guys particularly, the expectation level for people nowadays is all about BIM and 3D and clash detection and all those things.
So even if Revit could handle that level of detail, you still feel that it would just be faster to communicate through hand drawings?
Particularly in the early stages it’s faster.
There are currently very few contractors or specialist façade fabricators that are set up in Revit or any of these other 3D models. You will find that the general contractors will be very BIM savvy, but even they don’t expect a huge amount of the façades to be modeled. They may ask for portions of the façade to be modeled, key interface details or areas of complex geometry. We often do performance mock-ups which are maybe 30 feet wide and two stories tall; they may ask for that to be done in three dimensions so they can plug it into their model. That will probably be it.
We still need and have all of the CAD modeling and analytical skills to respond to project requirements, but the ability to sketch and draw details quickly to convey an idea or resolve a complex problem still has an important role to play in the way we develop our façade designs.
It seems like an interesting historical moment where the trend is to go toward BIM for a variety of reasons, some of which are very good and practical, but some that are maybe more about jumping on a bandwagon. The industry seems to be a bit in flux in terms of what methods are most appropriate.
It is. I worked with Zaha Hadid’s office in London – everything in the office is done in three dimensions. The expectation is that all deliverables on their projects would be issued to them in CAD. They don’t need to be in 3D, but they all need to be in AutoCAD. So we would send our hand drawings to our Australian office in Sydney, Australia would CAD them up overnight, and then we would issue these to Zaha Hadid’s office.
When I moved out here and started working with Frank Gehry’s office, I assumed that they would be all about 3D. But once I started working with them I realized that they like to do everything with physical models, and everything had to be drawn by hand. We weren’t really CADing anything up for that project until our hand drawings had been signed off by the partner in charge. It was interesting that their process is actually much more similar to the process I’ve been talking about, where there’s a line in the sand. You can still be designing and optioneering, but there’s an obvious point where it then becomes a very three-dimensional element. That’s the way Gehry’s work is made. I can’t guess how many physical models are in their office. They were keen for us to maintain that hand-drawn process, and for me that was very refreshing and inspiring.
This article comes courtesy of Arup Connect, the online magazine of Arup in the Americas, each week exploring the people and ideas shaping the built environment throughout North and South America.
