Will BIM catastrophically divide the architecture profession?

The links to the source documents for this post have been updated.

I deliver quite a few professional development talks for architects, planners, and occasionally others in the AEC industry.  For the past few years, I have often included a small segment on the transformative impact of BIM (Building Information Models).

I like to point out that BIM also stands for Building Information Management just to focus my audience's minds - because the word 'model' is so often misinterpreted by architects in particular, as just incremental change to 3D CAD from the 2D drafting application they may be presently using.  Exactly three years ago in one of those presentations, I raised the prospect of BIM suddenly, catastrophically, and irreversibly dividing the architecture profession.

Over those years, I was getting little traction,because even the biggest firms did not see themselves as handicapped if they avoided the complications of being early adopters.  Now, suddenly, BIM is much more in the news, and thoughtful commentaries on the factors to be considered by architecture practices are becoming much more accessible.

The first article that triggered my renewed sense of urgency was Building Information Modelling (BIM) – what should you include in your contracts? by Nick Crennan and Lindsay Prehn of CBP Lawyers, laying out the minefield of time and cost, collaboration and data input management, insurance, intellectual property and confidentiality issues. For me, the attention grabber in the article was the key recommendation of the Australian Department of Industry, Innovation, Science and Research and Tertiary Education report (the National Building Information Modelling Initiative, Volume 1 Strategy) released in June 2012, being that from 1 July 2016, all government building procurements should require full collaborative BIM, based on open standards for information exchange.

The second article was by Stephan Langella, Strategic BIM Manager at Rice Daubney architects, who delivered the lion's share of the documentation for school halls constructed under the Australian Government's financial stimulus package after the GFC.  Stephan set out clearly that adoption of BIM had to be informed by sound business planning, where the benefits for productivity would be realised by the practice.

But notwithstanding that both authors know a lot more about BIM than I do, I felt that neither was putting the case in quite the stark terms in which I see it.  Why do I make the dire prognosis I do in the second paragraph of this post?

I say that at the crudest level, BIM capability simply divides to profession into those who can and those who can't. It is much, much more profound than the CAD the revolution of the early 1990's, which was handled by practices poaching trained CAD operators (thereby externalizing the training cost), or simply biting the bullet and picking up the training (sole operators and smaller firms). That can't really be done as easily with full-blown BIM.

At the more subtle level, BIM implementation in the office allows smaller teams to handle larger jobs. That puts a lot of salaried architects out of work. Here I differ from Stephan Langella's advocacy of more architects becoming more skilled generalists. I think the need for smaller teams puts at risk the available expertise spread being applied to a particular job in the architecture office. That in turn has to have consequences in terms of who tops up the missing skills – it is vaguely possible that it will lead to greater specialisation, with some architects becoming guns for hire and comfortable in their role as consultant architects. But they would still be a smaller number than equivalent specialists currently employed by firms of equivalent size. The worse scenario is that the new experts are not architects at all. If so, it would only be continuing a trend of a smaller portion of the total fee take being available to the architects – which sets up a positive feedback loop reinforcing the differentiation of architecture firms on the basis of BIM capability.

The idea of 'suddenly' comes from the suggestion that government at all levels mandates a switchover date, when, like with QA certification, they simply will not accept work to be done without full BIM participation.

There is no likely prospect that most individual firms can make a 100% clean switchover. But even that will reinforce the severity of the problem for local employed architects. The rump of work that will be done in 2D CAD (and for a while it may still be the majority of the work) is likely to be increasingly shifted offshore. Not necessarily to low salary countries like India, but quite possibly to Singapore with its lower cost of doing business.

I mention again my minor definitional issue, that BIM can stand for either building information model, or building information management. A lot of the talk is about the problems attending ownership and intellectual content of the model, and the threat that it poses architecture firms. But equally, the skills of building information modelling and management appear to be sufficiently distinct from even 3-D CAD modelling, as to flag that there may not be a clear progression path for many employed architects. And for very small architectural practices, it could represent a fatal cliff in terms of shifting the skills base.

Of course, I could be wrong in all of this. Participation in building a BIM model could turn out to be easier than I anticipate. The National Broadband Network could deliver bandwidths such that even small Australian practices can engage successfully with a bigger BIM held on a server by a BIM manager. It could also turn out that there is an irreducible complexity in BIM that makes it uneconomical to apply to a particular range of building types that then remain lucrative for a certain kind of architectural practice – it would ensure the survival of those kinds of practices, but ironically, would conform with my prediction of an unbridgeable divide in the profession.

Read Building Information Modelling (BIM) – what should you include in your contracts? here.
Read BIM and the “Beautiful Game” here.