Breaking BIM: A Transformative Design Methodology for Building Information Modeling

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is no longer just a tool for project delivery and production. It is now a critical, precise tool for design and analysis. This research on “Breaking BIM” seeks to identify new relationships between design processes and BIM that leverage the computational resources for design objectives. The paper outlines three approaches to breaking the constraints of BIM with more intuitive workflows for design. These include associative modules, conceptual massing, and component hacking. The work here is a summary of four years of experiments in dissecting Autodesk’s Revit. The explorations occurred as teaching activities and within my own design practice. A methodology will be described for designing through relational objects that identifies BIM as a process of transformative design. With a transformative design methodology, the designer is given a default typology, and must deconstruct or reconfigure the typology to establish a new type. This process of object transformation characterizes design customization strategies in common BIM platforms like Revit.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.106.28

Volume Editors
Amir Ameri & Rebecca O'Neal Dagg

ISBN
978-1-944214-15-9