Agent Provocateur – BIM in the Academic Design Studio

Building Information Modeling challenges academia to question the fundamental roles of abstraction and simulation in design education. Architectural education and practice assume a traditional set of visual conventions at varied scales and levels of detail, that when taken in concert signifies a whole, complete idea of a building, a correspondence between design intent and interpretation, between the representation of ideas and the design of buildings. BIM viewed as provocateur to these assumptions provides potential critical analysis of how architectural design is taught. Academia must seek out new design methodologies for exploring architecture that reflect the representational shift of BIM by developing teaching methods that reprioritize ways of seeing, thinking and making. This paper describes a studio model that seeks out new active methods for exploring architecture that embrace this shift by developing processes that provoke novel ways to reconcile the traditions of abstraction and the opportunities of synthetic simulation.