Models, Technicity, Labor: In Conversation with Amelyn Ng
“Borgesian BIM Object Library," DEEP CITY: Climate Crisis, Democracy and the Digital, International Latsis Symposium, EFPL, March 24-26, 2021. Produced with Rice graduate students Yun Koo and Alec Burran. Software used: Autodesk Revit 2021.
Jimmy Bullis (JB): Some architecture firms are moving towards using BIM models as a contract where the 2D drawings would previously remain the legally binding document. This change puts new pressure on architects to model perfectly and understand the model space even more precisely. Maybe it frames the architect as “Master Modeler” as opposed to “Master Builder”? What implications might there be for architectural labor if the focus is increasingly on tending to a digital object?
Amelyn Ng (AN): You’re right to hint at a turn from 2D drawings to a “Master Model.” The ubiquitous BIM model has become a locus of interdisciplinary information (architectural, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, sustainability consulting, and so on) compounded into a single database that gets higher-res as a building project is developed. But while the model becomes a centralized site of power, I don’t think that the architect necessarily becomes a “Master Modeler," at least not with the same degree of central command as the old “Master Builder” figure. Rather, the architect is now one of many coordinators of the Master Model (the “A” in “AEC,” or Architecture, Engineering, and Construction). Many firms now have BIM managers—a telling signal of how much our profession now, as you say, “tends to the digital object.” I’d say that instead of architect-as-master-modeler, the emergence of BIM heralds the architect-as-consultant and shares affinities with larger corporate AEC firms, which were already emerging in the 1970s in the US, in a bid to remain competitive in a global corporate workplace.
On the one hand, the BIM model takes us away from the singular gaze of the Master Builder and recognizes a range of collaborative and often unattributed labor that goes into making a building. On the other hand, it may also make architectural work more divided in the office (“designer” vs. “technician”) and increasingly liable for predictions about a building’s cost, time, performance, and life cycle. If designers increasingly use information models to predict a building’s actual built performance, traditional hourly rates of architectural work (payment based on real labor done) might be replaced by rewards of accurate prediction (payment based on whether an architect can guarantee a building’s post-occupancy success). This would essentially mean betting architectural labor on BIM.1 But this might also mean that architectural work might even become more error-averse than ever, and higher-resolution design entering the project earlier than ever. The information model is now proposed to be used from sketch design through construction (and possibly through building operations). Architects might gain skills in precision and workability at the expense of conceptual design exploration through a variety of media.
JB: We are seeing many cases of exploitation of labor in contemporary architecture practice to maximize the profit of stakeholders and, at large, capital. I wonder if BIM can deal with this issue. By shedding light on the process of producing architecture, can BIM provide a relatively accurate estimate of required labor? This information can be reported and surveilled to protect the rights of people—young designers or construction workers—who are at the lower part of the food chain. This transparency may also lead to a more efficient distribution of labor not to solely and viciously speed up the process building but, rather, to avoid unnecessary labor as a way of caring about workers. How does this reading figure into your thinking?
AN: This is a great proposition! If only there were a BIM version of Who Builds Your Architecture to estimate not only material costs and construction time, but also how they relate to labor ethics.2 But in order to do this: the profit-based practice must shift towards a more rights-based model. In other words, our use of information in software, whether for efficiencies, experimentation, or ethics, would reflect the firm and the building industry’s own value system. The Architecture Lobby has a nice piece in ARQ that explores what “value” means for practice, within and beyond the present systems of commodification.3
JB: In your essay “7D Vision,” you write that BIM visualizations, models, and construction phase animations may be used to enhance design credibility, buildability, and subsequently, to help win contracts. Visualization has always had this power to present ideas with a sort of legitimacy and immediacy. Besides the association of technology with saving labor and money, how else is it different to leverage a 3D model or animation to convince developers to work with you?
AN: For me, the question of media always invites the question of credibility. BIM visualizations are seen as documents that work — i.e., the environmental analysis, cost spreadsheet, or 4D virtual construction sequences our tools generate are presented to the client as evidence of the building to come. It builds confidence in the “product’s" buildability and alleviates the sense of uncertainty often associated with a construction project, where building cost, time, and quality carry potentially costly unknowns. Drawings and models, especially information-rich ones, produce a kind of consensus (and political and economic will) around something that does not yet exist. Even physical models have long gathered publics and compelled investments.
3D models and animations are frequently leveraged to secure private development—from precise feasibility studies to building public confidence in intensive infrastructure proposals. But instead of more of the same, I’m more interested in other kinds of leverage, or after philosopher Michel Feher, counterspeculation.4 A technically savvy climate activist might know how to tweak parameters, BIM objects, and 3D model analyses toward climate care rather than just cost efficiency. Or, one might produce high-res models that show that, for example, investment in green public infrastructure works, and works well.5 Animations might show the radical benefits of transitioning building systems from active to passive cooling—with the spreadsheets to back it up. Other calculations and animations might compel stakeholders not to build on land that is important to local communities. That worker-activist might also present to their client, not just the cost of running a building over its life-cycle, but also a revaluing of physical maintenance work and support for working wages. Perhaps when working not with developers but with organizations joint-using an existing community building, one might calculate the operational schedule of multiple organizations that could work in the same space, and check for clashes between existing infrastructure and new retrofitting interventions. Keller Easterling might call such know-how medium design.6 BIM is that kind of drawing that can enter the boardroom of decision-making. I suppose what I am positing is: can models be leveraged like a rendering, but for numbers? Might “7D” architectural media speculate on other possible futures for climate and just transitions, beyond the aesthetics of heavily photoshopped green pictures with happy people?
JB: I like your vision of subversion in the digital world in order to affect the natural one. How tied is it to digital surveillance and privacy, though? There is often little wiggle room to make changes unseen and without consequence within corporate structures and it may require a whole other skill set to navigate these operations safely. When you write about this (Avery Shorts Live, in particular) do you envision a practiced and stealthy activism?
AN: I recognize that many spheres of techno-social life (including drawing) are subject to the surveilling digital eye, or at least are reliant on predominantly corporate structures. The entire Adobe Suite is a Cloud subscription, meaning that creative producers no longer physically own their tools of production (perpetual licenses) but must now rent them. As the 3D model becomes more of a legally binding document, there has been speculation about extracting more data from the user—for example, by developing a blockchain ledger to trace every action (and error) made in a 3D model file and attribute it to the specific worker. There are also discussions on the BIM model acting as a smart contract or real-time record of payment, which could, for example, automatically pay subcontractors upon the completion of a task. These ‘innovations’ might seem a long way off, yet one can find digital monitoring devices on the worksite right now: in a recent piece for the Buell Center I describe the biopolitics of the Amazon wristband and Spot-r wearable devices monitoring construction-site injuries that further codify the worker’s body. However, this doesn’t mean that one should be completely beholden to technologies or see them as inevitable. We now potentially have entire supply chains at our fingertips and desktops. What if designers collectively refuse to work on certain problematic projects like prisons? What if information-rich models were used in the future to bargain better wages? What if we invert the surveilling-eye and establish construction industry watchdogs for regulating environmental and fair work standards? There must be something in the power of the many subscriber-users to petition software companies, to make collective claims on wages, to interplay digital-physical problematics in our profession.
JB: The level of surveillance by the digital eye seems directly linked to the obsession for efficiency, while it overwhelmingly benefits the client/funder. Do you see a boundary for the level of details or a point of pushback?
AN: Levels of detail—in other words, resolution—is a political threshold. From CCTV footage of public spaces or point-cloud scans of existing buildings, to Google Earth satellite images, to the modeling of a building: decisions are made about what/who gets described, how prescriptive the instruction or documentation is, and who has the agency to either disappear from the image or fill in the gaps with their own interpretation. I’m thinking of scholars like Laura Kurgan and Vittoria Di Palma, who write about the biases of satellite imagery and Google Earth’s zoom.7 Then there are artists like Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen, who examine and expose the optics of surveillance media, “poor images,” and “operational images” in their work.8 Forensic Architecture is a research group cognizant of the politics of resolution as they use digital architectural models, simulations, and even social media footage in their investigations on human rights violations. Founding director Eyal Weizman has written about how low-res or imperfect evidence can be registers of trauma and a form of witness.9
Going beyond the digital, architecture firm AD—WO has connected the idea of measurability to the historical colonial apparatus.10 Maps, for example, may render land as abstract, calculable, and therefore more vulnerable to extraction. In their RDA Spotlight talk about immeasurability, they shared representational strategies that seek immeasurability and push back against this architectural impulse to see and know everything.11
Even in the domain of traditional architectural practice: construction documents are so bound up with legal risk and liability that it is often better to keep some ambiguity in drawings and specifications to allow more “wiggle room” for the builder’s interpretation, and to reduce the risk of overspecification. I think there is also room for letting details describe not efficiencies but narrative. Perhaps that is a larger question for architectural representation: what other narratives, stories, voices, and critical perspectives can we build and share within an increasingly technical arena of work?
JB: What leverage do architecture “workers” have over software companies regarding the ownership and T&C of our productivity tools? There seem to be few alternatives in the production process and outputs for the producers unless there are tools created collectively by designers.
AN: Indeed, open-source databases and design tools could be developed in tandem or on top of our existing rent-based tools. But perhaps at some very basic level, design workers might simply ask that software providers revise their subscription options toward fairer conditions. These could include support for recent grads and freelancers who don’t have educational licenses, or allowing small firms to purchase perpetual licenses for specific software (and not pay monthly subscriptions for an entire suite). SketchUp could be made free again. Subscription software is one of those commodities that Marx may not have anticipated. If there exists the possibility to sell infinite copies without proportional material costs, then that access to creative production should really be made more rather than less affordable over time.
Amelyn Ng is an Australian architect and cartoonist. A graduate of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, she was a 2019–21 Wortham Fellow at Rice University Architecture. Ng studied architecture at Melbourne (AU) University and is licensed in the State of Victoria, Australia.
Ng's research-led practice examines the technics and politics of architectural representation and its capacities for non-canonical knowledge. Recent grant-funded projects involved collaborating with community organizations in Houston, TX, in translating underserved residents' experiences of pandemic stress into house plans and creating public maps about industrial toxicity and environmental injustice.
Ng’s ongoing work on building information modeling and the entanglement of drawing with labor and material systems was included in the 2021 Venice Biennale Pavilion of Turkey. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, e-flux, VOLUME, PLAT, Assemble Papers, and POWER: Infrastructure in America, among other publications.
1Some practitioners are advocates for this kind of future. See Phil Bernstein, Architecture Design Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2018).
2See Who Builds Your Architecture (WYBA?), http://whobuilds.org/.
3The Architecture Lobby, "Haciendo lobby por el valor: un diálogo / Lobbying for Value — a Dialogue," ARQ 97 (December 2017): 14-27.
4See Michel Feher, Rated Agency (New York: Zone Books, 2018).
5See Holly Jean Buck, “On Carbonscapes by Design,” Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form (Fall 2019).
6See Keller Easterling, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World (London and New York: Verso, 2021).
7See Laura Kurgan, “Representation and the Necessity of Interpretation,” in Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology & Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 25-28, and Vittoria Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” in Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri, eds., Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (New York: Routledge, 2009), 239-270.
8See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux, no. 10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/, and Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images,” e-flux, no. 59 (November 2014), https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/59/61130/operational-images/.
9See Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Thresholds of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017), and Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” in Forensic Architecture, ed., Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014): 9-32.
10See Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, "Architecture Without Measure: Notes on Legibility,” e-flux Architecture, July 14, 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/404210/architecture-without-measure-notes-on-legibility/.
11See Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, "Immeasurability," Spotlight Award Lecture, Rice Design Alliance, April 14, 2021, https://www.ricedesignalliance.org/event/ad%E2%80%93wo.