David Deiss - M.Arch ‘17
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Thesis: BIM vs BIM or In the Penal Colony
Thesis Adviser: Perry Kulper
Drawing is dead, long live the drawing!
Drawing can no longer compete against BIM (Building Information Modeling) at delivering information of a building’s constructability. From now on drawing must relinquish its right over the architecture’s physical qualities and become a critical tool that expresses the theoretical and allegorical qualities of architecture. The thesis - Building Information Modeling VS Being Imaginary Mechanism - attempts to establish a new dialectical relationship between drawing and BIM while it presents a design based on Franz Kafka’s penal colony. Frantz Kafka’s “In the penal colony” establishes a situational structure where the physical and spatial qualities of the design are established through a BIM model, while the narrative and the allegory of the design (and the story) remain in the realm of the drawing. The statement is that the new type of drawing - Being Imaginary Mechanism - is to be a new medium to represent the allegory of a design as opposed to the drawing’s original purpose. Part of the claim is that there is room for both, for BIM and for BIM, and only by establishing the clear roles of each will drawing be saved. The BIM model demonstrates the spatial and physical qualities of the design along with the richness of the data, while the drawing demonstrates the richness of the narrative and other dramatic aspects of the design. Therefore, Building Information Modeling is a concern of the question of HOW, while Being Imaginary Mechanism is a concern of the question of WHY. Thus, this new dialectical relationship shall produce a critically driven design that can exist even without being built.
Thou shalt draw lines of the wall no more but the lines of the life the building!
