Dualing Headlines

CADwire.net had this pair of competing headlines in its daily summary earlier in the week:

• ArchiCAD START Continues to Deliver Breakthrough Price for Building Information Modeling (BIM)

• CADDIT Releases 'Anti-BIM' AEC, MEP AutoCAD Add Ons

To BIM, or to not-BIM. It certainly is a philosophical question. Graphisoft argues in favor, because now...

...architects with tight budgets can deploy a powerful BIM solution they could not previously afford.

So, Graphisoft is intimating that BIM is otherwise expensive. In contrast, CADDIT argues in favor of...

...building design without the overhead involved with Building Information Modeling (commonly known as BIM).

(PS: Speaking of headlines, here's a really pooly constructed one from the National Post: "Ontario law banning smoking when child's in car starts." How about instead, "New Ontario law bans smoking when children in car.")

Comments

[AutoCAD-IntelliCAD]

[sarcasm]The debate to BIM or not to BIM rages on I see. With so many comments on this posting you might think people actually struggle with the decision.

Such a major decision though, it's almost to much for a person to handle. So much stress trying to decide is really starting to make my day a "BIMmer"...[/sarcasm]

TGIF

[CADDIT]

Thanks for that. Actually, we thought about both paths very carefully before choosing our direction.

One of the most common things with BIM was (ironically) poor downward scalability of this approach, not to mention the (aforementioned) high cost. BIM is often too expensive or time consuming (both in re-training and implementation) for many designers. One example we heard involved a project 'a single sub-system (like fire-safety) was BIM designed', but that construction requirements were too precise to follow through with the same technique for the balance of the project. I think, "how much sense did that make? What good is something that is only going to segment already-heterogeneous design methods into even more confusion??"

The core question is perhaps "does the building really need BIM, or are they just being told (by clever next-generation marketing) that they do".

So we decided to take a stand not unlike CADKEY's "anti-parametrics" protocol of the late 90's (which was actually working really well for them until Baystate finally lost an unrelated several-year old lawsuit). Our customers require easy-to-use, real-world design tools that they can afford (just hundreds of dollars instead of thousands).

CP-System (a key element of our "Anti-BIM" platform, so to say) already works seamlessly within all low cost AutoCAD alternatives, including progeCAD and even AutoCAD LT itself (using LTX). So, the fit proved to be "quite natural" to our company as well.

Is BIM the building design path of the future? Perhaps. But it is not the building design path of today - at least not at CADDIT.