Monday, October 04, 2004
Bye-bye, blueprint: 3D modeling catches on
You don’t have to contemplate the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles for long to grasp the notion that standard two-dimensional drawings might be inadequate for architect Frank Gehry.
The buildings are fantastic explosions of curvilinear shapes, executed in ways that seem more appropriate for paper than structural steel. They’re also representative of a dramatic new approach to designing and constructing buildings: building information modeling, or BIM, in which blueprints and other two-dimensional documents are replaced by 3D computer models, with each element of the design imbued with information about its real-world properties, such as how much weight a steel beam can hold.