OK: So "Today I Picked Flowers"

Well, Not really but this is going to be an 'Ideas Only' posting... While reading a fellow BIM Blogger's thoughts on Technocentrism (Thanks JN) I had these thoughts. I hope they apply, here ' goes:

BIM too will be surpassed one day by something more brilliant...the only constant is that all Architecture and Engineering solutions (at least the great ones, in my opinion) are born out of imagination. The technology available at the time is merely what we'll use to communicate those ideas so they can be paid for and maybe even built.

Now, BIM software may help us in those endeavors but it will not make the ideas for us and although we can program in mathematics, formulas, parameters, etc. to solve problems or even to generate shapes, etc. the computer is still quite dumb (They have no creativity!!! And that's what ALL the Arts take)...

As, I believe, Picasso said of computers: "...But they are useless. They can only give you answers". Any idiot (sorry idiots) can use PhotoShop, etc. to apply a watercolor or impressionist or cubist 'effect' but no computer will ever come up with those movements on their own, let alone in context to society or fractions of societies.

So BIM or CAD or even BIM-VS-CAD should be seen like the pencil overtaking the pen or scratching in the dirt...it's just a new (maybe better...definitely better!!!) but still just a tool; another way to illustrate our dreams so they can be manifest into 'reality', such as it is. It didn't take computers (as far as we know) to design any of the pyramids around the world and look at their impact on civilizations. Nor were Gaudí's forms realized on computer...it will always be genius (or some close approximation) that generates Art, let alone Art of any great impact. I just hope some of the buildings (and Art) we are now creating don't make us, as a society, look like idiots (sorry again) who are blindly applying an effect or two, or ten... and then thinking that's somehow worth the toilet paper it would be printed on.

Viva la imaginación.

-J