The Freelon Group

            It is always a unique opportunity to me when I get to experience a different side to design that I had previously not been aware of and visiting the Freelon Group was no deterrent to that precedent.  As designers, we tend to express ourselves through our creativity, our visual learning, but design is every bit as much about business and communication as it is art, and that is an aspect that I am beginning to understand through professional practice.  I gained a lot of knowledge about the Freelon Groups design process solely from how they presented what they were looking for from applicants.  There was a continual theme of, ‘simple is better’.  This became evident as soon as we entered their firm, with its sleek surfaces and rich materials without saturated graphics.  This philosophy is also reflected in the types of projects this firm selects, being mostly institutional, where a modernist approach is prevalent.  Even the simple yet elegant detailing of Kathryn Taylor’s business card speaks to their minimalist intent, a standard 3x2 card with the Freelon branded green and a small etching on the side are just enough to make a statement while maintaining its legibility and dignity.  In all, I gathered that their firm is more invested in a holistic design process where the goal is always looking towards the end result, which, in many respects, is how I design.

            On a quite different spectrum, Paula Carr’s firm, TVS Designs, intent lies in creating commercially eccentric and stand alone installation pieces that are meant to rethink how we interpret space planning.  From our discussion, I gathered that her firm looked for great diversity in potential interns, looking at skills ranging from hand rendering and schematic ideas to well polished digital renderings.  Their was a greater involvement and attention paid to the concepts to their designs that I didn’t receive from the Freelon Group per say. 

            However, the truth is there is no one way to be prepared for what lies in the professional arena, it is about adapting to the needs of the firm and then extended to the client.  Designers job is best described as mediators and interpreters.  We process the ideas of our clients, communities, and firm and use our creative foundation to work in a world of business.

BIM Modeling : Parametrics and Modeling Programs

For the purposes of explanation, I like to dissect the words ‘parametric’ and ‘modeling’ separately. Parametric is a system of precompiled yet customizable proportions and coordinates for objects within a modeling program.  The modeling portion refers directly to the family categories, specifically in Revit, which include things like doors, windows, walls, and furniture.  While we like to think of the modeling families as concrete, permanent objects the parametric computations allow that object to be manipulated in scale, materiality, and graphic appearance, so while there is a universal idea about what the object is, there is many ways parametrically to customize that object.  The extraordinary parametric modeling in Revit recognizes not only the connection in an object but the connections of those object to other objects and will adapt those changes in every computational field, i.e. floor plans, sections, elevations, site, schedules, etc.

After having completed the Revit tutorial, I realized that I have never been so easily maneuvered through a modeling program before.  Having heard from other piers who took this class before me, they equated Sketch-up’s 3-d warehouse component bank to the task oriented family components of Revit.  While I can see the connection, Revit’s parametric modeling is much more flexible allowing me to customize the components and set my objects to industry standards rather than questionable models shared by other Sketch-up users.  I adore Sketch-up for it’s ease of use and quick ideations and will still use it as an initial staging modeling program but once the concept and kinks are worked through, I will turn to Revit for professional use.  I have used Rhino’s NURBS modeling program, which is based in a similar system as auto cad with color coded layers and hard to maneuver 3-d modeling.  Revit’s interface is much easier to use on an architectural scale with devoted families to architectural elements like floor plans and objects like walls, where as Rhino is more suitable for tasks like product design and design installations. Rhino has no initial connections either, while you can join lines and create groups, they are still inherently just lines and can be dismembered at the user’s discretion.  Furthermore, it would take multiple more steps to create a 3-dimensional wall in Rhino as it would to simply select a wall in Revit as with any other component in Revit.  Sketch-up and Rhino have been the only other modeling programs I have used in addition to Revit and they all work quite differently from each other, Sketch-up being drawing based, Rhino NURBS based, and Revit BIM based.

Computing in Architectural Design

Justin McNair

IAR 311

01/10/12

Professor Tina Sarwigi

Computing in Architectural Design

My gatherings from this chronological history of computer aided design is that we are always trying to find the balance between ease of utility and quality of the product, which is mixed to create the best sense of efficiency possible.  Computers have enhanced design by perfecting what the human hand is incapable of or is much less efficient at but, still in my opinion, at its early stages of conception, the computer comes with many frustrations because it is a more specialized extension of our natural abilities. The essay begins by stating architectures’ need for order in the form of geometry and algorithms, which leads me to believe that we have to organize to maintain civility and the computer, is an extension of that civility.  1^st generation CAD programs were used to support the mathematical engineering in buildings, to enhance the structural load and extend the reaches of material properties.  These programs later became very useful for companies in the automobile and aerospace genres to test performance, structure, and safety.  By the 1970’s, two branches of computer aided design unfolded, one towards engineering and the other towards construction.  The construction branch was more architecturally based but appeared more as diagrammatic solutions for early building concepts rather than full-fledged design building programs we know of today.  2^nd generation CAD programs were meant to placate towards a wider genre of architecture firms rather than just corporation giants through affordable machinery and were focused mainly on basic drafting and modeling abilities still not up to par with professional design work.  It took the advent of making tools faster to really make computers a viable designing engine with breakthroughs in processors, graphics, memory, and raster colored printing.  2^nd generations computer programs focused on a more general geometric language in the form of polygons and NURBS, which was simply more effective for modeling and rendering but more analytically crippling to the first generation programs that worked more naturally with presets of doors, windows, and other architectural components.  While the architectural industry was dumbing down there products for the sake of representational models other engineering industries were making their products more intelligible by encrypting layers of information within their software so that they could tell when the computer model would witness real world conferences.  For example, when silicone would heat up in close contact with another material and become a fire hazard.  As these advances continued the computer began to literally create its own environment, an alternate reality that could predict the outcomes of real life applications while also making communication an instant occurrence.  The computer has become a global environment makeing physical human interaction obsolete except for our own attachment for emotional contact that grounds us again in the reality that we are not machines ourselves.  There is swiftly becoming a breach between what the computer can offer with human interaction and the automation that leaves ourselves tending to only the concepts of our work.