Beyond BIM

Book excerpt: Beyond BIM explores the vast and under-explored design potential undertaken by information modeling. Through a series of investigations grounded in the analysis of built work, interviews with leading practitioners, and speculative projects, the author catalogs the practical advantages and theoretical implications of exploiting BIM as a primary tool for design innovation. Organized by information type, such as geographic data, local code, or materials, each chapter suggests a realm of knowledge that can be harvested and imported into BIM to give meaningful specificity to architectural form and space. While highly sustainable, the work documented and envisioned in this book moves well beyond ‘normalization,’ to reveal inventive takes on contemporary practice. Beyond BIM serves as a primary resource for professional architects from practice, researchers and designers engaged in information related spatial design processes, as well as students and faculties of architecture schools in search of BIM design inspiration. Likewise, those highly attuned to computation and unconventional ways of creating form and space, particularly built outcomes that utilize BIM, will find this book meaningful and essential.