Why don't architects make the most of IT?

The problem with virtual space is that, so long as they lark around in it, architects need no longer ask why real-life construction is so backward (to work in, and in terms of product) when compared to other industries. This article is kindly reproduced from the September 2004 issue of insITe, the magazine from the IT Construction Forum.

Even purely digital architecture has its place. But set even the most delightful weightless fantasies of virtual space against the burdensome reality of how most architects actually have to spend their time with IT, and those fantasies become rather tragic.

If architecture became serious about manufacturing and IT, it would become more powerful. Until that time architects will continue to console themselves with the idea that they are, if not powerful, then certainly creative. They will continue to work cheaply on, and flatter themselves about, the minority of culturally significant buildings that society wishes to lavish resources upon.

Many rightly consider Computer Aided Design (CAD) a tool with which architects can and should work creatively with colleagues and other professional disciplines. Many know that it would 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 offices today reduces junior architects, and, episodically, quite a few middleweights to the role of being 'CAD monkeys'.

Instead of CAD living up to its promise of freeing users from stupid, repetitive tasks so that they can perform creative ones, hundreds of young architects, trained over a period of seven years, spend up to a decade of their careers as keyboard-and-mouse jockeys who constantly re-invent the most mundane items. Worse, they are without access to the technical support they need in the preliminary stages of design, when the exigencies of project management constrain budgets.

Many architects complain that they spend too much time on mindless details and not enough on grand design. But the fact that so many young architects spend so long crouched over hot computer screens speaks more of twisted priorities on the part of their employers than it does of any inherent flaws in IT.

Yet the principals of many architectural firms, for all their ethical commitment to social responsibility and having employees as 'stakeholders' in their business, are preoccupied not with innovation in studio processes and organisation, but with getting their one-off branded buildings and their personal brands into the public eye. The Web is used as a means of advertising, or as a means of saving money, but not - yet - as means of open access to professional architectural knowledge, or the knowledge of related disciplines.

IT is often adopted grudgingly, as a threat, rather than for its promise. The conventional wisdom among architects' practices is that 'those companies that do not embrace IT will miss out on new business to those that do'. But letting staff have free rein with IT is another matter.

Perhaps the Internet exposes boardroom rhetoric about empowering employees as somewhat unlikely. Perhaps it also 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. For the moment, however, such progress in knowledge that is made within individual architects' offices is kept proprietary. To take advantage of the chief characteristic of software - that, once built, it can be easily duplicated and spread over the Internet at little cost - is to court disaster in the courts.

Architects could make their own life a lot easier by relying on each other more - electronically. But 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 won't architects share ideas through IT?

There is of course some ineptitude and cowardice at work. This is concealed in the mystique that surrounds architectural design, which is supposed to shift attention from the large to the small scale only over a protracted period. As a result it is easy for ignorance and indecisiveness to lead the devil of details to be delegated to juniors at the last moment - or worse still, abdicated to contractors and further to a multiplicity of trade contractors as 'the practical experts'.

A more basic problem is simply an unwillingness to grapple with the truth head-on. On a development, it is vital, at the start of the project, to identify the most complicated architectural interfaces and hand-over points between the different trade contractors present. Clients should always summarily dismiss a project architect who fails to do this. They should always ask the awkward question of where architectural integration is most difficult, and should always insist that talent is directed to resolving integration issues at the beginning. It is not difficult to compile a list.

The discipline to work with CAD to minimise construction interfaces in number and variety frequently eludes architects. It is just not fashionable to repeat details. Contemporary architecture is often gratuitously complex, regardless of the technical ability to deal with the explosion of variables. It seems that architects always want to express themselves not by assigning a special merit to a few really great components and technologies, but rather always to expand the already lengthy menu at their disposal. Indeed, it is often mediocre environmentally-minded practitioners who most wastefully indulge in the excess of 21st century bells and whistles that is available to them.

The non-standard, bespoke, novel and never-to-be-repeated is the real and wilful 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 outcome is obvious. Buildings have errors designed in, and the reputation of architects declines. In a vicious circle, clients retaliate by insisting on contracts that reduce, to a bare minimum, all fees for the production drawings, coordination and testing that are so essential to the success of their building. Then, relieved by angry or doubtful clients of its responsibility for buildable interfaces, the architectural practice loses technical ability over time. Finally, reduced to the status of a 'concept' designer, it can smugly accuse the trade contractor of ruining the beauty of his or her creations. The architect can remain blissfully unaware of how hard it might be to reconcile design intent with site-built weather-tightness. For their part, contractors can more and more make the riposte that architects don't know how to detail.

In the end, weighed down by technically clueless and counter-productive schemes, the conceptual architect is likely to escape into computer visualisation, probably teaching an expanding brood of students the mysteries of spatial design without gravity, weather, construction operatives and the building user. As a result, the profession brims with:

• bored junior CAD monkeys who dream of their promotion to concept design
• directors and associates who have lost more and more of the will and ability to force their visions into buildable form and to train juniors accordingly.

Clear design leadership is required, and to support that, a firm base of technical knowledge. If they were properly thought about and managed, CAD and the Internet could play a part in laying out that knowledge base. At present, however, the IT that is around in construction is used at only a fraction of its potential. James Woudhuysen 15 September 2004

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