It’s true… I’ve only used Revit once and it was yesterday. Since we had our class cancelled on Thursday I finally took the time to sit down and educate myself on how to use the software. This was possible because our classmate Rachel has been involved with creating a Revit file for our slat shack project and I figured what better way to dissect the program than with a project I already know inside and out. As you can see by the cover photo, it may not be as clear-cut as you would think, or maybe as other drafting/BIM programs out there – the interface is a little less user-friendly – however, the foundations (no pun intended) are all still there.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, it’s important to note how we go about our process this semester of course and something that we haven’t mentioned yet is how we will transition to the CD (Construction Document) phase of this project and produce real ‘spec sheets’ that call out all the parts, hardware, and all that other happy stuff that we live for. Revit is what you would call a BIM program, which stands for Building Information Modeling. This is where the user essentially models a building in a 3-dimensional space on the screen and all other aspects of a structure are automatically generated; the elevations, sections, materials, etc. BIM is certainly the industry standard and it’s important for us to learn how to use it if we want to market ourselves in the digital world of architecture, where traditional methods of drafting and modeling seem so antiquated you could almost render (another pun…) them as obsolete.
It will be interesting to see in future posts how our CD’s look and hopefully, as a reader, you are able to extrapolate how we came to produce them even without an architectural or BIM background, or at the very least you are familiar with the process and may be able to explain it to somebody and appear intelligent…?