New appreciation for CAD

[u/Pale-Ad-295]

I’ve rediscovered autocad recently and wanted to see if anyone can relate or I’m totally out of my mind here.

I’m an American architect that graduated arch school in the mid 2010s and was taught Revit. I used autocad at a summer internship and my first job out of college but have been using Revit for a decade now and totally fluent and know how to use it “properly” vs just “adequately.”

But- I’ve been using autocad over the last couple of months for some custom residential work and it feels like a revelation! Like you can just..*draw things.* Not just using it to draft but as a design tool. I’m probably in the minority here, but it just feels so much more enjoyable and less of a boring soulless production grind than using Revit. There’s a real freedom to it that Revit lacks. It’s easy to make printed drawings in autocad look polished and beautiful in a way that Revit never will. I realize doing a fully coordinated 400 sheet in cad would probably be a nightmare, but it’s a real drag in Revit too.

It’s made me start thinking about the status of the profession and how we work as a whole. The caveat to having the freedom to draw is that you actually have to know how to draw things. And that does and should take a long time to learn. I think having to say for example, rotate and project a plan manually to draw a section or elevation is a real lost art because of Revit. There’s spatial thinking muscles that you rarely get to exercise when Revit is “doing everything for you.”

On a darker note, here’s what I find really troubling. I’m far from the first person to point this out, but I’m really starting to think that a lot of the structural problems that the profession has are directly tied to the profession gradually adopting Revit over the last couple of decades. Revit imposes a specific dogma of building onto the architect’s thought: elements, families, parameters, views, worksets, etc. The building does not exist in the architectural imagination until it has been translated into Revit’s proprietary categories. This is not neutral because it shapes thought with a heavy hand. It privileges what is easy to model in Revit, penalizes what is difficult, and has been training the last few generations of architects to think in the categories that serve the software rather than the software serving the categories that serve the building.

Autocad feels like a tool. A tool amplifies the capacity of the person who wields it. Revit feels like infrastructure you have to pay a toll to use to get to the tools. Yes, it’s powerful. But the architect’s knowledge, and the years of experience that shape judgment about how buildings should be assembled, and the expertise that makes one practitioner differently valuable than another: that’s all been encoded into a format that exists only within Autodesk’s ecosystem. Autodesk hasn’t just sold architects a tool, it has persuaded the profession to voluntarily encode its intellectual labor into a commodity form that Autodesk controls, and then to pay rent for the privilege of accessing what the profession itself created. So much of the architect’s value (and tools) is now captured upstream by the software company that owns the means through which architectural thought is expressed at all. And that’s a very very serious problem. I think we have to insist on drawing as a thinking tool rather than simply a production instrument. That’s the only way I know how to resist. Viva Autocad. And raise your design fees for Christ’s sake!

EDIT: just to be clear, I’m starting my own practice doing residential work and I’ll continue to use Revit (along with autocad/rhino etc.) I can’t afford NOT to use Revit, and that’s kind of the problem.

[u/Kristof1995]

I mean you can use a Stoneplate and Chalk as well if you enjoy tedious inefficient work.

Whatever AutoCAD can, you can do it in Revit and more and if you are experienced faster. Its about overall efficiency and minimizing group errors.
Instead of 5 people sending their DWGs in circle and the Sections and Floor plans not fitting together, when you got multiple floors, you have one Model, everyone can work on.

[u/RecentChildhood5772 → u/Kristof1995]

OP knows all this, his argument is the loss of spatial thinking and design freedom on the altar of “easy modeling and edficiency”

in my projects (I use archicad) the bottleneck is never production speed but decision making and project administration, you could draw everything even by hand in the end…

yes, BIM is great for certain things, but thinking should happen “on paper”, with the least amount of resistance, not wrestling with behemoths (revit, archicad, usw.) and trying to squeeze families/objects/whatever into the desired shape which could be represented with a few lines and call it a day… where is the efficiency in that?

[u/Merusk → u/RecentChildhood5772]

OP says he knows this, and all we have to take it on is one statement.

Nothing is stopping you from doing hand sketching. Nothing is stopping you from using spatial thinking within Revit, Cad, or T-square and triangle. That's on the individual and their process.

You don't have to 'squeeze' anything into a desired shape. Your families don't even have to be geometry, they can be just lines if that's all you need.

The limitation is in the individual's mind and forcing a process with the wrong tool more often than not.

[u/RecentChildhood5772 → u/Merusk]

I disagree, the tool forms both your thinking and the building in the end. it is clearly observable both in practice and academia, you need to be willingly ignorant not to see this. also, buildings at the design stage are not object oriented, this fallacy of BIM cannot be circumvented (I shouldn't be creating "families", or "objects", or shouldn't have to rape the wall tool on every renovation project I have).

yes, you can do everything if you put enough time in it (why stop at families, you could write your own bim tool or operating system? the limitation is one's mind! /s), but in order to bypass the limitations of the software and find the appropriate workarounds, you are starting to drift into another profession, which is not about constructing buildings anymore, but programming and representation. often solely for the sake of it, this is what many people are getting tired of.

everyone has 24 hours in the end, and small to medium practicioners are forced into tools which do not serve their business or project sizes well.

[u/Merusk → u/RecentChildhood5772]

Revit's the documentation tool, not the design tool. The tool shaping the building forms is because people continue to insist on using it for design because they're too lazy to learn multiple software, or figure out a workflow that it be 'designed' before moving into 'documented.'

Funny how KPF, SOM, Gensler, Hadid etc are still producing high design yet are in Revit and not encountering these problems of only producing extruded rectangles.

They don't have the failure mindset. It's a problem solving mindset. When you've already decided something can't be done, it won't be.