Architects as CAD monkeys

Britain's £83.6 Billion construction industry needs a more serious approach to Computer Aided Design. Anyone who wants cheaper and better architecture, and houses in particular, should stop monkeying around with CAD. And if computer literate graduates are ever to improve their employment prospects they need to force such a change.

CAD ought to be able to help British architects work creatively with colleagues and other professional disciplines. It should be easy to borrow or originate ideas from one source and collectively develop them, with the aid of IT, into built form.

Yet the reality of teamworking in building design studios today reduces many architects to CAD monkeys.

Instead of CAD ending stupid, repetitive tasks and opening the way to creative ones, thousands of architects spend the first decade of their careers using it constantly to re-invent the most mundane items.

Many complain that they spend too much time on mindless details and not enough on grand design. But this is not the fault of IT, even if long hours tweaking plans and elevations on screen often makes things look that way.

The fact is that the principals of many architectural firms are preoccupied not with innovation in studio processes, but with getting their one-off branded buildings and their personal brands into the papers. In construction as elsewhere, the Web is still used more for advertising than as a means of open access to professional knowledge.

With buildings as much as music and video, the Internet challenges the culture of copyright protection that has come to dominate business life, and especially the world of IT, over the past decade ­ a culture so obsessively legalistic, the accent in intellectual property is much more on the property than on the intellectual side.

Thus, such progress in knowledge that is made within individual architects' offices is kept proprietary. To duplicate architectural software and distribute it over the Web is to court disaster in the courts.

Despite all this, the underuse of IT in architecture needs explaining. After all, architects are not averse to plagiarism: most get a lot of their ideas from the same stream of glossy architectural magazines. So why don't architects share ideas through IT? Why do they insist on turning CAD into a mindless bore?

Many fail to use CAD to minimise the number and variety of the most complicated architectural interfaces and hand-over points between the different trade contractors on a project. It is just not fashionable to repeat details.

The non-standard, bespoke, and never-to-be-repeated building is the willful architectural motif of our present anti-machine age.

Out of the chaos of on-site construction this gratuitous aesthetic makes a virtue. It increases the number of drawings that are required to coordinate critical interfaces, and so diminishes the time the architect can devote to perfecting and testing each interface.

The result is that our new buildings have errors designed in, and the reputation of architects declines - especially when they try to find an artist's refuge from society's exasperation with the architectural profession in endless on-screen fly-throughs into buildings that will never actually be built.

As fees evaporate in a crisis of disrespect, this country's much-vaunted architectural practices pay their monkeys peanuts. Yet even if left to an eternity, a studio full of CAD monkeys will never design a good building.

And despite the peanuts, the drawings are always required tomorrow. James Woudhuysen 16 August 2004

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