Virtual Aggregation of Consumer Architecture

Two things will always remain true.

1. People want things faster and faster.
2. You or your company’s presence on the Interwebs is a must.

Imagine telling a client to head to a site to construct, or select all of the amenities, square footage bedrooms, etc., of what they want to have in their home and as they are selecting items a 3D model is being reveled and built in real time reflecting all of the changes that they are making with just the click of a mouse. Sure, they may not be able to do every last thing that they way, but they would have almost unlimited options within the building blocks the Architect has designed. The idea is there is a system that the Architect has actually designed and been able to incorporate multiple variations into the model on the back-end before a client even arrives in an office or visits a website. The system could update within constraints that the Architect has specified that meets his or her design language. The client wants the master next to a spare bedroom that will become their kid’s room in the future? No problems just check those boxes please.

What would we begin to even design a system like this in though? Think really hard. Lets use my favorite program of choice of course, Revit! We can already control multiple parameters of families and components in Revit we just need to tweak the controls a little bit. What about using yes/no statements and conditional statements? Sure, that can work! We can even hide interior walls, roof, or floors depending on the adjacencies that the client may want in the future. I refer to these parametric models as all-in-one mega families. With a mega family you aren’t just creating an object and the sizes, or materials of it. Instead, you are creating the ability for one unit to become every unit of a home by clicking simple yes/no parameters.

The next problem occurs when we try to have the client interact with the mega-family we created. Seems how not many clients actually know or understand Revit we need to put all of this mapped ability within an interface that most of us know and love. Mapping these variations into a web browser would allow the client to pop open a website, and start to answer questions about the home they are wanting. These questions would tie directly back into the parameters that the Architect mapped earlier. As the questions are being answers the model on the screen is auto-regenerating right in front of them.  Instead of having the image above it looks more like the one below.

Why does this even matter? What wrong with how Architects perform their duties? The answer is that there is nothing wrong with what an Architect does now. However, this certainly does matter. I have a firm belief that as the need for Architects to become more tech savvy the ability to finish a project in faster and faster times becomes even greater. Instead of designing each and every single home or commercial building that walks in the office from scratch they could spend time developing a system. That system could be implemented worldwide and has the ability to almost completely cut out the Design Development stage of a project. Ultimately it’s about the client anyway and they want everything now, not 4 weeks from now. I firmly believe that anyone that figures out how to aggregate virtual modeling to the internet in a way that clients can use the front end while Architects are working the back-end will finally turn the tides on Architecture as we know it today.

In the end you still wide up with a product that has the Architects thumbprint all over it.  The only difference is that the time spent on each product because shorter and shorter thus allowing for a wider client base and an expanding business model.  There will always be space in the business ecosystem of architecture for niche appeal, but who is going to be the first to reach out to the consumer?

Thanks for reading! Tell me what you think.

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