To BIM or not to BIM

I think there’s a current mood in society that progress has failed us in different aspects of life. We live longer and healthier but our lives are blander and the places we live in are more generic. The scientific process has saved us from peril but has also brought onto us new types of problems. The future seems full of great opportunities but we are weary because we’ve seen the disasters that progress can bring. This reaction to change can be seen in the rise of Populism all over the world and extreme violence in some corners of the world. Our generation has also been marked by Great Recession, another symbol of failure of an international order. Surely, a return to Critical Regionalism is another symptom of this discontent.

Frampton describes critical regionalism as a process of “double mediation” between universal civilization and world culture. He says that the “mediation of universal technique involves imposing limits on the optimization of industrial and postindustrial technology”. This seems to me more relevant now than any time before, especially with BIM. BIM is bringing construction to a level of industrialization that was previously only possible in the automobile industry. BIM is the ultimate tool for the uninspired architect. Millions of different pieces, some designed and built in different parts of the world, come together to make a Frankenstein of a building with no regard to local craft, climate, culture, etc. You can drive down the street and tell what buildings were designed with BIM software because they all have the same bland arrangement of materials and poor understanding of details, how horrible is that? How do we practice an architecture that is critical of universality when more and more we are expected to use tools that encourage that type of architecture? BIM is here and is going nowhere because it is a result of our market. It's another way in which a drive for efficiency forgets about things that aren't easy to put a number and give value to, one of the million of small complexities of life that modernity has overlooked.