This review engages with the Revit Basic Sample Project, “rac_basic_sample_project.rvt,” using Autodesk Revit Architecture 2018. The latest version of the house at the time of writing is downloadable from “Revit Sample Project Files,” Autodesk, March 29, 2017, ➝. Building Information Modeling (BIM), the prevailing industry standard for architectural modeling today, is a “process of creating information models containing both graphical and non-graphical information in a Common Data Environment.” Used widely by architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry professionals globally, Distinct from 2D drafting or 3D geometric models, Building Information Model refers to an information-rich, “intelligent” digital model that can also detect clashes, organize parametric object data, automate schedules and drawing updates, visualize cost implications, coordinate global teams, and, in theory, manage entire building life-cycles. See Richard McPartland, “BIM dimensions - 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D BIM explained,” National Building Specification, July 10, 2017, ➝, and “What is BIM?,” Autodesk, ➝.
Full disclosure: I am a newcomer to Revit, having used MicroStation and ARCHICAD for most of my practising life (and even then, I’m no specialist). This “house visit” will simultaneously be a test in user-friendliness for the unskilled critic.
Anne Friedberg once declared: “Perspective may have met its end on the desktop.” More specifically, the “window” may have met its traditional metaphoric end on the desktop, shifting “from the singular frame of perspective to the multiplicity of windows within windows, frames within frames, screens within screens.” That is, the graphical user interface allows frames of any number, type, and order to coexist non-relationally: a dynamic “multiple view” that upends our classical relationship to perspectival space as pictorially composed or serialized. See Anne Friedberg, “Introduction: The Virtual Window,” in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 1–2.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (Winter 2004): 43.
For distinctions between “dumb graphics” and “intelligent” objects, see Rick Rundell, “1-2-3 Revit: Not All BIM is Parametric,” Cadalyst, February 15, 2005, ➝.
Alexander Galloway has theorized the overtaking importance of the nondiegetic display in games such as the World of Warcraft. Through toolbar icons, gauges, and other skeuomorphic overlays, it “deploys an entirely different mode of signification, reliant more on letter and number”—a fair characterization of the BIM workspace whose very predicate is the dynamic manipulation of non-graphical data beyond mere model geometry. See Alexander R. Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,” in The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 41–42.
Laputa is a flying, levitating chunk of island described in Jonathan Swift's 1726 classic, Gulliver's Travels. Much like a Revit model, Laputa is monarchically governed and maneuverable in any direction using powers of magnetic levitation. See Jonathan Swift, “Part III. A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan,” in Gulliver's Travels: Into Several Remote Nations of the World (Waiheke Island: Floating Press, 2008), 230–238. On a more political register, Félix Guattari has also theorized the city as a “totalizing structure of equipments” that can exist “outside of the city (the flotilla of Athens, for example)... {which} carry political power that can re-enter the machines of the socius.” This speaks to the logic of the BIM model and its technophilic corollary, the “digital twin,” which appear outside the world (virtual and offsite) yet carry restructuring power. See Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories, and Collective Equipments,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989): 108–109.
“Approach” is the default name of this hovering 3D View.
See Ryan Bishop, “Project ‘Transparent Earth’ and the Autoscopy of Aerial Targeting: The Visual Geopolitics of the Underground,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–8 (2011): 270–286.
Ibid, 284.
See “About the ViewCube,” Autodesk, February 8, 2017, ➝.
“Causal pleasure” is a term used by Wendy Chun to describe the pleasure programmers derive from seeing their code produce visible and predictable results; this is said to imbue feelings of absolute power and control over a fully “micro-world”. This might describe the gratification of a user-amplified BIM model: to see all your drawings automatically update to your one command, or to visually see what you do to the ViewCube directly affect your model view. See Chun, “On Software,” 38–43.
It is not so easy to open a closed Revit door in the first-person view. I am not alone. For examples of unresolved frustrations aired in a CAD troubleshooting forum (another emblematic site of unpaid self-improvement, social capital, and collective emotional labor), see bkappler, “How do I open doors during a walkthrough?,” Autodesk Knowledge Network, May 4, 2005, ➝. Paradoxically, in order to simulate a walk through a Revit model, a camera must first be created along a path. Every stroll is premeditated and guided by machine vision. See also Autodesk Help, “About Walkthroughs,” Autodesk Knowledge Network, April 10, 2018, ➝.
The Revit model kitchen comes stocked with (not-so-)Generic Models such as a Miele Oven, Washing Machine, Tumble Dryer, MasterCool KF 1911 Fridge and Freezer, Miele Built-under Dishwasher G 4101 U CS… On free Miele Revit Families, see Luke Johnston, “New Miele ‘Residential’ Revit Content Library - Now Available,” The BIM Hub, December 7, 2016, ➝, and ➝.
The technically correct answer to this question is “the Revit Server Host,” a central server network where a common model is stored, enabling synchronized worksharing across a project team or organization. See Autodesk Help, “How Revit Server Works,” Autodesk Knowledge Network, April 9, 2018, ➝.
The abovementioned property “RPC Female” refers to Rich Photorealistic Content, meaning these human tokens can render to look like specified real people. (The formal parameter for this is “Render Appearance: Third Party.”) For now, ontologically underperforming YinYin must remain faceless for the purposes of quick model processing.
See czoog, “And the Winners are.........,” Autodesk User Group International, May 5, 2004, ➝. The original Parametro webpage, like most unarchived software marketing campaigns, is no longer available.
See Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” trans. Robert Hurley, in Michael Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 176–177.
It is worth noting that gender is totally binary; here one only finds RPC Males and Females. Ableism and ageism abound. After Alex, Revit’s Imperial family is listed, in this order: RPC Male: Dwayne, RPC Male: Jay, and RPC Male: LaRon. A suite of RPC: Females follow, ending with our protagonist, YinYin. See Autodesk Support, “RPC People library,” Autodesk Knowledge Network, September 24, 2013, ➝.
Alexander R. Galloway, “We Are the Gold Famers,” in The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 132.
For uncanny images of vampire-white BIM human content packs for sale, and for step-by-step illustrations on how to turn yourself into a (disturbingly detailed) custom RPC object, see Dan Stine, “Best Practices for Custom RPC Content,” Enscape, December 8, 2017. A quote from the author to illustrate: “I love the detail {of my Revit avatar}, with the pattern in my shirt, the wrinkles in my pants and even the wrinkles next to my closed eye.”
Cluedo is a British murder mystery board game, created in 1949. On the original gameboard, the plan view of each room is shown empty and depicts no objects or furnishings—the game is enlivened instead by players’ moveable object-tokens. Clue, the North American version, developed perspectival house-plan backgrounds of increasing detail, populating rooms with the eerie minutiae of a recently lived life: colored carpets and floorboards, a lit fireplace, a half-played billiard-table, untouched dinner-table settings (sounds like our Revit house)… It could be said that Clue is analogous to the Revit sample project: in this object-oriented puzzle of who-did-what-where-and-how, players see everything-at-once, yet can know nothing of the game unless inquiries are made about specific things. In both “houses,” the domestic scene has been (pre)set, awaiting latent action by the intruder (you).
In Revit, section markers in plan are “smart” annotations that reference “live” section cuts. This means that, unlike the painstaking 2D geometric constructions of earlier CAD section drawings, a detailed section drawing can be generated instantly from the 3D model, and automatically updated by simply moving its section marker in plan. The adjustable section-cut is also a hallmark of other 3D visualization tools such as Rhino and SketchUp, though they tend to entail the manipulation of an actual cutting plane surface in 3D view, rather than via planimetric annotations per a (more documentation-oriented) BIM model.
In Close Up at a Distance, Laura Kurgan explains how the apparently singular, confident zoom of Google Earth is actually a “patchwork of archived aerial and satellite images of varying origins, sources, motivations, and resolutions” that are not even generated by Google. I am acutely aware of the irony of using one virtual model (Google Earth cartography) to corroborate another (Revit sample project). See Laura Kurgan, “Introduction,” in Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 20.
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 6.
See Orit Halpern and Gökçe Günel, “Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope,” The Fibreculture Journal 29 (2017): 2, 5.
“Songdo, like any major technical product today, is not an object, it is a process. It is a beta version for urban life.” Ibid, 6.
Google searches of any of these phenomena quickly call up a trove of aggressively techno-optimistic prophesies for the future of the construction industry, in which BIM adoption is a central tenet. Deeper trawls may lead you to other unsettling concepts such as Digital Taylorism and Single Source of Truth (SSOT). Most articles have been released in the last few years, signifying the currency of these discussions.
Halpern and Günel, “Demoing unto Death,” 2.
See Lumion’s balmy renders and GIFs at “All-Improved in Lumion 8.3: LiveSync for Revit,” Lumion, March 26, 2018, ➝.
See Michel Feher, “Introduction: Journeys of Political Despondency,” in Rated Agency (New York: Zone Books, 2018), 7-16.
“today, with the ability of to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I’m changing the motto now. And this is an official public statement… ‘deploy or die.’” See Joichi Ito, “Want to innovate? Become a ‘now-ist,’” TED, March 2014, Vancouver, Canada, ➝, 5:20. See also Nancy Duvergne Smith, “Deploy or Die—Media Lab Director’s New Motto,” Slice of MIT, July 29, 2014, ➝.
“You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count.” See Ito, “Want to innovate?,” Quote at 5:22.
From Katerra’s vision statement: “A technology company at heart, we're applying tested systems approaches from other industries to design and construction.” The rapidly accelerating start-up was founded in 2015, just a year after Ito’s “deploy or die” pronouncement. See “Our Vision,” Katerra, ➝.
A wager-not-wages schema has actually been posed by former Autodesk Vice President Philip Bernstein, in his recent book on BIM for current and future professional practice. The BIM model is regarded as a behaviorally accurate instrument for predicting building performance, which architects can effectively use to bet the costs of their services. This risk-embracing proposal to empower the architect through outcomes-based fees and technologically mediated entrepreneurialization may be said to take a “demo or die” approach to the profession. See Philip G. Bernstein, Architecture Design Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2018), 145–147, 157, and 177–178.