Meta-data in Architecture

I spoke recently with a local architect who is buried in meta-data. He explained that 15 years ago a building would be conceptualized in two dimensions as a structure with four walls and a roof, but since then the complexity of any given project had become ten times more complicated. There is the building code. There is material science. There are environmental best practices. There are economic concerns. There are geographic considerations and there is a ton of ethnographic data. Collecting, managing, and synthesizing all those datapoints has become a huge challenge.

Enter the Building Information Model (BIM). This is a 3-D version of Autocad with meta-data baked in. A building plan used to be about how many bricks, at what cost, in what colour. Now the building model can calculate how much latent energy went into the creation of a specific brick. It can tell you how much diesel fuel it likely took to get each brick on site. If the cost of steel has just spiked, the BIM can tell you how much steel the project needs and it will substitute in a cheaper material and isolate any resulting problems. You can literally drill down on any element in the design and get the underlying data.

Hearing about building models and the associated software made me think of ERP systems in large corporations. They are expensive, exclusive, and data intensive. But then I had to catch myself. There is nothing particularly difficult or expensive about collecting meta-data and making it available at a super-local level. We are doing that already. The interface and the network simply need to catch-up.

(photo by 0100 Design)

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