Woobius: Please describe who you are and what you do.
IG: I’m Iain Godwin. I work as an IT consultant for architectural and engineering companies. I used to be Head of IT for BDP and started working with technology in the early days of the 1980’s working with 3D CAD in its infancy. Then I became Director of IT at Fosters’ before setting up my own consultancy. The sort of consultancy I offer is in three areas: what infrastructure an architectural practice needs to operate on, what information systems they need to be able to utilise, and the project technology side – the design tools required to produce the deliverables, i.e. 2D and 3D CAD, analysis, simulation and visualisation tools.
Woobius: What do you feel have been the most influential developments in ICT development in the construction industry during the period you were working at BDP and Fosters and Partners?
IG: I don’t think it is necessarily the technology but the way that education has embraced technology. Lots of people were building 3D models back in 1981 but the technology wasn’t able to properly extract drawings. The reality is all the 3D and a lot of the geometry existed back then and was capable of being deployed. For example I remember working on a hospital project in a multi-disciplinary team at BDP in ’81 which was designed in 3D.
Woobius: So what happened?
IG: Everyone said we needed to draw more and make physical models and as such everyone went back to 2D systems. 3D just went away, disappeared. Microstation was always 3D from the ground up. So I think the biggest difference has not necessarily been the technology, more the way people have tried to use and deploy it and how education, especially with architects, has built this level of architect who can program and script in 3D systems, building upon the geometry. Nothing works in isolation. The people, and the peoples’ potential to use technology, and the process involved in how far you can push that application into the bounds of what can be delivered as a multi disciplinary team are continuing to grow, and hopefully they are blurring more. I think people get much more out of the systems by challenging where the boundaries are between different disciplines.
Woobius: Can you pinpoint one particular building where these new methods of working were successful or not?
IG: I think Swiss RE was the beginning at Foster and Partners in terms of the more intelligent deployment of geometry with technology. Prior to this we had teamed up with Bath University and Chris Williams to develop the geometry and structural solutions for the British Museum Roof. This collaboration led to Fosters introducing that expertise internally and creating the Specialist Modelling group. This has gone from strength to strength providing a real process and people resource.
The group was born from conversations between myself and Robin Partington trying to find somebody who could help the team work with the geometry more efficiently. They were using people like Mark Goldthorp as external consultants but it was hard for him to keep up with the design development. We needed an in house team who could keep track of the design development and work in parallel with the design team much more closely.
Woobius: In my experience architects are notoriously bad at ignoring new technology and prefer to stick to what they know best. Is this the case in your experience?
IG: I think there are always two camps. There are people who are very comfortable in their own skin and with their own knowledge who want a risk free, sure footed, road to their next project. They also want to be secure in the knowledge they can deliver using their existing methodologies. There are others who will always push the boundaries in terms of new ways of working and deployment of new tools using the skills available to the team, whether it is young or old architects. I don’t think it is an age thing, there are some more senior architects who think in a much more flexible and progressive manner and there are young ones who are much more comfortable in a particular skill base and don’t want to be seen as ‘3D modellers’.
It is important that you are always pushing not to end up with a skill bottleneck – you want to take on new skills in order to add more to the team. The richer the skill base the more you get out of it because you are not reliant on a particular road that becomes problematic when you are up against it with a deadline or delivery. This is especially true when you get into 3D methodologies, you don’t want to be in a situation where the skill set is confined to an individual. The beauty of scripting, and building tools that others can exercise, is you are unrestricted – the logic is locked into the tool and not the individual.
Woobius: You mention the ‘team’. A team only works when it collaborates successfully and obviously it’s a tricky business. What are the major barriers at the moment?
IG: I think contract types and liabilities are a big problem at the the moment. An architect doesn’t know how to model efficiently in order to get the best out of a services engineer, so an architect will build a façade model in order to make it look really good, which is absolutely right because he is after that aesthetic, but he’s not building that façade model in order for it to be run through an analysis package. So the engineer spends his time remodelling rather than analysing. If an architect could get twice as much analysis done by an engineer he may reconsider the way he would model that façade.
Woobius: Are you promoting any technology to make this happen?
IG: Not so much individual technology but process. You don’t want people to be locked into a single technology. You want people to be able to use whatever technology is best for them to solve the problem. Concentrate on the process and concentrate on the interoperability between systems, not one-or-other specific platform. It shouldn’t be about the platform but more about connecting the dots and sharing the same information. It sounds easy but is difficult because you get soft spots in the team – those that don’t have the discipline and don’t play the game in the optimum way.
Design teams (from different disciplines) don’t always understand these issues and when you get them talking it is sometimes only the team leaders who interact. Actually, the guys creating the models need to talk together and often those conversations need to go across before they go up so the modellers fully understand each other. A much lower level of collaboration.
Woobius: Don’t you have to almost negotiate it for every project?
IG: Yes, that’s the tough bit. The relative importance of structural versus environmental engineering, and what drives what in the building and design process, affects those modelling strategies. For example on Leadenhall, the ‘Cheesegrater’, by Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners, the steelwork is architectural steelwork. It is not clad and is completely exposed so therefore the architect is driving exactly how that structure looks and operates. It’s then a quite different dialogue about what your modelling strategy is to maintain the integration of the two things together.
Woobius: It is obviously a difficult time for the construction industry at the moment. In your experience is ICT provision one of the first costs to be reduced to balance the books and if so is there a counter argument that says now is the time to invest to lower your costs over the long term?
IG: Technology is at the forefront of marketing projects in the first instance so you cut your ability to deliver with technology at your highest risk because you cant be seen to compete at all levels. You would be mad to cut your ICT capabilities and allow them to fall behind others in the market place with whom you are competing. I think it is also true that sometimes management don’t understand the need for specialist skills in the use of technology to match the way that architectural practice is developing. You need lots of different types of skill in order to optimise your use of technology and I think when practices are downsizing they sometimes fail to understand the importance of specialist skills which are often pushed out.
Woobius: Like scripting and Generative Components?
IG: Yes. The productivity gains are substantial if you organise your team correctly to work with the available tools. Some practices haven’t got this balance right in the way they have adjusted to the new reality. Others have adjusted and are investing in information systems to make sure they can get at their data and knowledge base within the practice.
Woobius: What do you think is the ‘next big thing?’
IG: Well, I saw something last week which was fantastic and you know was going to happen. 1-to-1 3D printing of concrete sculpture in this instance. It’s only a matter of time before parts of buildings are printed. This makes 3D modelling and collaboration even more important because the architect will be producing directly for the printers.
Of course one of the big changes we will see is in things like scripting and productivity tools. Intelligent 3D (I hate to use the word BIM because it means too many things to too many different people) will come down the scale to rectangular buildings rather than gloopy forms and be used by a far wider base of architectural practices.
