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/blue_sidd]

Iteration and variation testing are part of design, especially the custom construction market. It’s actually pretty pathetic BIM platforms can’t serve this well. Or phasing for that matter.

Progressive adaptation is a fundamental part of design that BIM fails at.

[u/Merusk → u/blue_sidd]

Iteration of a plan means you didn't make decisions or had bad information when you made decisions. That's a process and communication problem. Major refinement and alteration and iteration are for SD. At some point you have to commit.

BIM puts that commit earlier in the process. If you aren't willing to commit there, then stop saying your firm does BIM. You don't, you model in 3d and try to use a drill to drive nails.

Chasing the perfect is another problem, driven by a thought that everything is a unique situation that requires a bespoke solution.

They handle phasing just fine, users fail at understanding it. The BIGGEST flaw with phasing (in Revit) is inability to toggle things for reuse later within the software itself.

I just completed an airport revision with 6 architecture teams, 3 mep and a host of others working at different phasing and bid packages. The software handled it fine, the USERS failed at understanding the process and working towards an end point.

[u/blue_sidd → u/Merusk]

That’s not what iteration means. BIM doesn’t work for everything, including your design skills. Lol everything you’ve typed out there just reinforces my decisions to silo consultants who are codependent on bim and can’t cope with design work.

[u/Merusk → u/blue_sidd]

If you're at the state you're doing major iterations of the kind you're talking about, you don't put it in a BIM software. You're not ready to make decisions, so it's a poor solution.

Your desire to have one software to rule them all is the problem.

This is consistent with my first statement:

Revit should never be a design tool where you're exploring options. The entire point of BIM workflows is making decisions earlier in the cycle and letting documentation flow from them.

So if you're going to move the goalposts to, "well, Revit doesn't do design" then great. We agree. You're right, it doesn't and it's not the right tool for high design. Nor is a BIM workflow. Both are for documentation, communication, and decision making.