PLAT 8.

0 Simplicity

PLAT 8.0 Simplicity

With contributions from:

Luigiemanuele Amabile
James Amicone
APRDELESP
John Capen Brough
Galo Canizares
Ryan Carl
Jimmy Carter
Kyle Chayka
Thomas Daniell
Davies Toews
Lauren Dean & Daniel Lazo
Nicholas Elliott
Frida Escobedo & Jesús Vassallo
Fala Atelier
Liz Gálvez
Monica Hutton
Carla Juacaba & Fernanda Carlovich
Dylan Krueger
Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal
Suzanne Lettieri
Emma MacDonald
Ajay Manthripragada
Mario Matamoros
Mary McLeod
Amelyn Ng
Janet Ni
Albert Pope
Wonne Ickx/PRODUCTORA
Davis Richardson
Chris Norton Riley
Tithi Sanyal
David Nunes Solomon
Anderson Todd
Yasmin Vobis & Aaron Forrest/Ultramoderne
Sarah Whiting platjournal.com
Letícia Wouk Almino @platjournal
 Contents

Janet Ni 0 Janet in Mexico On Off-squares 178 Ajay Manthripragada

Jack Murphy & Tiffany Xu 10 What We Talk About When We Talk About Simplicity Is Minimalism Simple? 182 Kyle Chayka

Wonne Ickx/PRODUCTORA 12 In Conversation Designing for Breakfast: Eileen Gray's E1027 Table 186 Emma MacDonald
and the Architecture of theDomestic
Nicholas Elliott 20 The Building Speaks: The Architecture of
Arno Brandlhuber Polyvalent Play 192 Tithi Sanyal

Carla Juaçaba & Fernanda
Carlovich
Luigiemanuele Amabile
Lauren Dean & Daniel Lazo
Frida Escobedo & JesúsVassallo
Jimmy Carter
28 The Imminence of an Event: In Conversation Simplicity is Dead 204 Davis Richardson
The Neoliberal Simplification of Architecture 210 Mario Matamoros
34 A Body and a Soul: A Generation of Architects and the
Construction of Modern Milan An Urbanism of Crisis is Doomed to Repeat Itself: 220 Albert Pope
In Conversation
44 Economical & Elegant
In Conversation 232 Mary McLeod
54 In Conversation
Trials and Virtues: The Armstrong Rubber Company 244 Monica Hutton
64 Double Trouble Headquarters

Liz Gálvez 68 Spec-ulative Specification Or: Reimagining the A Simple Gesture, or the Mathematics of the Ideal Line 254 Galo Canizares
Architectural Instruction
Plasticity and Influence in 1950s Brazilian Art and 260 Letícia Wouk Almino
Davies Toews 76 Sheetrock, Notes 1–20 Architecture

Yasmin Vobis & Aaron Forrest/ 88 Post Typical In Conversation 270 Thomas Daniell
Ultramoderne
My Neighbor the Hoarder 280 Dylan Krueger
Fala Atelier 102 Notes Towards the Definition of Naïveté...
Architecture Revisits the Nude 284 James Amicone
Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe 112 Il fera beau demain
Vassal A Deeper Style: From Mattes to Mashups 292 Suzanne Lettieri

John Capen Brough 150 Green and Blue and White All Over Everything that Rises: Balloonfest ‘86 304 David Nunes Solomon

Chris Norton Riley 158 Two Kinds of Economy: On the Recent Monographs of Anything But 310 Sarah Whiting
OFFICE & Valerio Olgiati
Colophon 312
APRDELESP 164 Four Principles For an Architecture of Do Easy
Andy in Mexico 314 Anderson Todd
Amelyn Ng 170 Unnatural Ease: Revit Interface in Three Acts

8 9

Autodesk Revit is registered trademark of
Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or
affiliates in the USA and other countries.
Below and opposite: Act I: Wall Sweep.
Autodesk screenshots reprinted courtesy of
Autodesk, Inc. and appear under a CC-BY-
NC-SA 3.0 license. Edited by author.
170
PLAT 8.0
Unnatural Ease:
Revit Interface in Three Acts
Amelyn Ng
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a process designed
to help us draw buildings more easily. Gone are the clunky
CAD command-lines of yesteryear. With Autodesk Revit®,
icons simplify, interface workflows automate, skeuomorphism
abounds. What results is a naturalized experience of filtered
vision and guided handling of digital things, enabled by the
smooth, performative magic touch of BIM.
The functionalities in the Revit machine, which, while
serving to ease the chore of banal modeling labor by becom-
ing more “natural” or “intuitive” to the user, incidentally con-
struct material paradoxes that would otherwise be unbuildable
or simply be impossible in reality. Caught between enabling
shortcuts for productivity on one hand, and communicating
complex object ontologies on the other, Revit compels its op-
erators to internalize, normalize, and bridge these semantic
gaps between representation and its referenced real on a daily
basis. These three Acts highlight some of BIM’s illogical log-
ics, its implausible physics. Drawing with Revit has never been
so unnaturally easy.
Act I: Wall Sweep
Revit’s Wall: Sweep seems like a rather peculiar name for a
drawing command. Sweeping floors and corners, yes. But
Simplicity
walls? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the active
form of “sweep” can mean three things:
sweep
VERB [WITH OBJECT]
(1) Clean (an area) by brushing away dirt or litter.
(2) Move swiftly and smoothly.
(3) Search (an area) for something.1
We can quickly rule out definitions (1) and (3); in the pris-
tine, all-seeing Revit context, only definition (2) would seem
plausible. What is more interesting is the verb’s pre-qualifica-
tion, “[WITH OBJECT].” One generally does not just sweep,
but sweeps something. This much is consistent with our Revit
command in question. Technically speaking, Wall: Sweep is
not used to create new Walls, but to apply crown moldings,
baseboards, parapet caps, and other add-on profiles to ex-
isting ones. For those familiar with SketchUp®, it is roughly
analogous to the Follow Me tool. In both programs, one
requires an existing object or path along which to “sweep” or
extrude a profile. This first Act literalizes dictionary definition
(2) with the addition of a brush: a first-order skeuomorph we
are well trained to recognize from countless prior experiences
with the Format Painter in Word.2
But the Revit user soon realizes that even definition (2)
falls apart in the parametric BIM environment. Unlike Sketch-
Up’s Follow Me tool, which requires the mimetic mouse action
of dragging a profile along a path, and unlike the click-and-drag
movement of word processing brush tools, Revit’s Wall: Sweep
involves preloading or typing in profile attributes, then clicking
on existing wall sections to apply the prespecified profile.3 The
swift and smooth motion of sweeping has been replaced by a
discontinuous series of clicks and mouse twitches, interrupted
1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sweep,”
accessed January 15, 2019, https://
en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/
sweep. Abridged.
2 In Google Docs, curiously, the
formatting brush takes the particular form
of a paint roller. This specifically
insinuates a wall application. If the digital
page is now conceptualized as a wall—
one might also think of the bottomless
Facebook Wall—then the book has not
killed the building but revived it, albeit in
totally derivative form. To be sure, Revit
Wall: Sweep is not actually represented by
an anachronistic brush, but a rather Revit-
like wall chunk didactically indicating an
operation... By faithfully visualizing
the model in an otherwise completely
rhetorical “sweep” operation, has BIM
somehow managed to kill the skeuomorph?
3 To see the Wall: Sweep tool in action,
see tutorials such as “Revit Tips and
Tricks - Wall Sweep,” YouTube video,
4:06, posted by Academy Class, August
2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=PRoJ4RzatA8; and “Wall Sweep
and Wall Reveal,” YouTube video, 8:40,
post by Jes S., February 17, 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AllACbleYYI.
171

4 This turn has been historicized and
theorized by Reinhold Martin. “Today,
before a pencil moves or a mouse
twitches, computation, or at least, a certain
computational intuition, has decisively
taken command in architectural design.”
Reinhold Martin, “Points of Departure:
Notes Toward a Reversible History of
Architectural Visualization,” in The Active
Image: Architecture and Engineering in
the Age of Modeling, ed. Sabine Ammon
and Remei Capdevila-Wering (Cham,
Switzerland: Springer Verlag, 2017), 9.
For a more BIM-specific history of this
shift from pictorial representation to
calculation-based modeling, see Daniel
Cardoso Llach, “Architecture and the
Structured Image: Software Simulations as
Infrastructures for Building Production,”
in The Active Image, 23-52.
5 See Length, in “Wall Sweep Instance
Properties,” by Autodesk Help, Autodesk
Knowledge Network, May 17, 2018, https://
knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-
products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/
cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Revit-Model/files/
GUID-F7CA00D2-72D1-4368-94A4-
17D7D0DDBFEA-htm.html.
6 To this, Autodesk adds: “Note: Artificial
lighting does not display in Realistic
views.” This technical disclaimer is,
unwittingly, probably the most true-
to-life statement they make in their
entire definition of Realistic Style.
See “About Realistic Visual Style,” by
Autodesk Help, Febuary 8, 2017, https://
knowledge.autodesk.com/support/
revit-products/learn-explore/caas/
CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Revit-
DocumentPresent/files/GUID-E84B38F7-
CCD8-4F3E-B580-EE27A07D818A-
htm.html.
Below and opposite: Act II: Visual Style >
"Realistic." Autodesk screenshots reprinted
courtesy of Autodesk, Inc. and appear under a
CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
172
PLAT 8.0
by dialog boxes and non-graphical data inputs. This seems to
embody the epistemological shift from mere geometric mod-
eling to “smart” parametric solid modeling.4 Indeed, Revit no
longer requires its human operator to work out how profiles
physically meet at corners and wall-edges, but now cleverly
detects discontinuous neighboring elements and automatically
sutures them together in a perfectly mitered fashion.
The hyperreal material specificity of Revit objects is
somehow thwarted by its own operational sequence. One
must have an actual bit of wall in your Revit model to begin
with, upon which to perform the desired trims. Disregarding
the pragmatics of standard manufacturing and supply of trim
carpentry to site, the parametric wooden baseboard or crown
molding cannot exist in space without the wall. Furthermore,
moldings come in standard lengths, which are then cut down
to size for installation. Revit profiles, however, offer no trim
tolerance; instead their lengths are calibrated to the precise ex-
tent of their corresponding walls. Trim length is a “read-only
parameter,”5 meaning you really can’t have
a parametric wall trim that is longer than the digital wall it-
self. This renders the term “trim” skeuomorphic. Ultimately,
to invoke Wall: Sweep, in all its semantically ludicrous glory, is
to defy the physical constraints of element construction and
installation for the conveniences of digital modeling.
Act II: Visual Style > “Realistic”
Seamless brick bond patterns… in plan? Revit’s “Realistic”
Visual Style, found in the View Control Bar, is fundamentally
at odds with everything we know about conventional building
logic: walls simply don’t, and cannot, exhibit elevational build-
ing textures in plan view. How do we parse such an incongru-
ous yet intuitive mode of architectural vision?
Confused, one first turns to Autodesk Help, only to find
the following (rather unhelpful) definition: “The Realistic
style displays material appearances in editable views.”6 Media
theorist Wendy Chun articulates this condition of appearance
far more incisively: we are, through Revit’s visually toggle-able
viewports, “manipulating objects in order to see” a world.7
Amelyn Ng
Simplicity
When computer interactivity shifted from the command-line 7 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software,
or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,”
to the graphical user interface (GUI), the learning and mastery Grey Room 18 (Winter 2005): 42.
of a computer system began to rely on the “direct manipula-
tion” of primarily graphical features; what Chun terms “sim-
ulated visibility.”8 Operating systems, she posits, “offer us an 8 Ibid., 40.
imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent
transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Software 9 Ibid., 43.
produces ‘users.’”9 The fictive relationship BIM constructs
between architects and their architecture through the Revit
interface simultaneously reifies the contemporary architect’s
disposition as a primarily desktop technician, one who “blind-
ly”10 accepts equivalences between digital and physical materi- 10 Chun considers the user’s undiscerning
use of software—an illusion of
al operations. Revit’s unproblematically seamless integration/ interactivity—a “blind faith.” Ibid., 44.
conflation of the plan, elevation, and render, all in one Realis-
tic style, seems symptomatic of a broader ambivalence of rep-
resentation in BIM technology development. This exchange of
architectural lucidity for visual clarity (tectonic turned visual
technique) underscores an increasing distance between those
who design the buildings (architects), and those who design
and own their means of production (software developers).
The texture maps of modeling libraries such as Revit’s are
also seamless. The infinite extensibility of the parametric Wall
necessitates, by extension, fields of graphic surface without
end. Seamless textures, while innocuously tame, are not neu-
tral surfaces; they have historically hinted at a closing-down
of politics. Art and photography scholar Sabine Kriebel iden-
tifies the effects of seams and seamlessness in political photo-
montage: in Dada collage, the articulated gaps and crop-edges 11 Sabine Kriebel, “Manufacturing
Discontent: John Heartfield’s Mass
of assembled images openly declare their constructedness; Medium,” New German Critique 36, no. 2
she calls this “the legible politics of pictorial rupture”.11 On (Summer 2009): 62.
the other hand, realist photomontage—such as those found
in totalitarian political propaganda—is a graphic technique 12 Ibid., 80.
that produces an “illusion of historical and natural [and thus, 13 Ibid., 76, and Stephen Heath, Questions
of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
ideological] continuity.”12 Kriebel names this surface art a University Press, 1981), 76.
suture, an aesthetic homogeneity “meant to sustain the spec-
tator”13 and temporarily suspend disbelief through what Ro- 14 Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic
Conditions of Surrealism,” in Originality
salind Krauss has called the “seamless integrity of the real.”14 of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths
Ruminating on the ontology of surface in a digitally-enabled (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 107.
Unnatural Ease 173

15 Metahaven, “White night before a
manifesto,” in The Architect as Worker:
Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and
the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer
(London and New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015), 17.
16 By “coherence,” Galloway means stable
institutions and works of art that “work”
to unify and center rather than disorient
or destabilize a system. See Alexander R.
Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,” in
The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2012), 46-47, 51.
17 See “Changing the Graphics Properties
of a Material,” by Autodesk Help, Autodesk
Knowledge Network, April 18, 2014, https://
knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-
products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/
cloudhelp/2014/ENU/Revit/files/
GUID-5DFA9F47-B6FF-4D79-A240-
FA27BEA7C7AB-htm.html.
18 Metahaven, “White night before a
manifesto,” 16.
19 See Bruno Latour, “Visualization and
cognition: Drawing things together,” in H.
Kuklick, ed., Knowledge and Society Studies
in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present
6 (1986): 7-10.
20 In recent years, Virtual Design and
Construction adherents (mainly BIM-
savvy contractors) have proclaimed
that “pixels are cheaper than bricks,” an
industry belief that the virtual simulation
of construction time and costs can mirror
real results on the building-site. As cost-
driven, predictive performance modeling
takes hold in the building industry, Revit
Realism may see the amalgamation of both
graphic performance and verisimilitude.
A particularly fervent example of the
maxim at work: “Pixels are cheaper than
bricks. The ROI for Virtual Design and
Construction is 2-3 times the initial capital
inlay. [...] If a picture is worth a thousand
words a 3D or 4D model must be worth
more!” See “Build it virtually, then build
it right!,” CHANDOS, accessed January
16, 2019, https://www.ipda.ca/site/assets/
files/1112/chandos_case_061.pdf.) See also
Rick Kolb, “Technology: Construction’s
Modern-day Judge and Jury,” Construction
Executive, Feburary 13, 2018, http://www.
constructionexec.com/article/technology-
constructions-modern-day-judge-and-jury.
21 Bernhard Siegert, “Introduction:
Cultural Techniques, or, The End of the
Intellectual Postwar in German Media
Theory,” in Cultural Techniques: Grids,
Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of
the Real (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2015), 14. Emphasis added.
174
PLAT 8.0
age, graphic design agency Metahaven adds: “Surfaces extend
everywhere, recuperating the potentiality for conflicts… thus
suspending the political.”15 Alexander Galloway would classi-
fy this regime of signification as ideological, with an aesthetic
and politics of coherence.16
Of course, Revit’s world of misapplied textures does not
interpellate us in the same way as Kriebel’s graphic suture
would the masses: the building materials rendered in Realis-
tic mode are still more gaming environment than real life. We
know Revit is not claiming realism here; these textures are just
working placeholders for the built real that is to come. In fact,
the icon used for Revit’s Materials browser (the locus of alche-
my for materials’ graphic properties)17 is itself a placeholder:
a universal render-sphere, mapped with the same grey-and-
white checkerboard one would find on a blank Photoshop
canvas. Metahaven writes on the erosive capacity of the
placeholder: “Placeholders […] possess the surface capabil-
ity of gradually overwriting original structures and original
texts.”18 This might mean that Revit’s Realistic mode of see-
ing, in its interminable customizability of surfaces, over time
supplants established understandings of architectural materi-
als with those in the model systems’ texture library. A Revit
brick—however parametrically imitative of the real stuff—can
only be visualized as a field of bricks.
This brings us to the eventual realization that Revit’s in-
congruous realistic-not-realistic model viewing style all comes
down to expediency and consistency. It is more important to
the Revit user to efficiently, economically, and reliably coordi-
nate between things than it is to corroborate the authenticity
or actual behavior of their referents (i.e. to know what and
where things are, rather than why things are). Revit Realism
values optical consistency19 and performance over verisimil-
itude20—whatever helps you draft a world more proficiently
into being. In making things obvious and user-friendly, the
interface somewhat forecloses on knowledge of how materials
are actually put together onsite. If Revit’s seamless textures
had a legible politics, it would be a literal one.
Act III: Door Editor
According to media theorist Bernhard Siegert, doors are cul-
tural techniques, as they “process the distinction between the
inside/outside, which therefore cannot be restricted to one or
the other side of the distinction. Rather, they assume the posi-
tion of a mediating third.”21 Does this hold for digital doors in
the Revit-world?
The Revit Door Family is a curious parametric object
that can be endlessly customized, iterated, and populated in a
model while retaining its editability and singular identity. This
Amelyn Ng
Simplicity
allows users to quickly make model-wide changes to all the
instances of a door type just by editing a single paradigmatic
“master” file. This editing is done via a separate pop-up di-
alog22 called the Family Editor. Editing a parametric23 door
(e.g. its size, frame and leaf thicknesses, even door handle
type)—or any Revit Family for that matter—inevitably sum-
mons this extra window containing nothing but the object in
question, no doubt for the ease of ubiquitous editing. Upon
closing the dialog, Revit prompts you to save the file, after
which all instances of that object are instantly updated in the
central BIM model.
Devoid of any other context in the Editor window’s mod-
el-space, the Revit door literally has no inside nor outside. Its
degree of opening can be numerically specified in a parame-
ter, but it opens onto nothing at all—even though the default
representation in 3D editing mode shows the door as eerily
ajar. Thus, the Revit Door cannot be considered a cultural
technique as such, as it does not mediate any inside/outside
distinctions. Taken as such, it is purely symbolic. The pop-up
editing window, on the other hand, might be considered a cul-
tural technique, in that it distinguishes and correlates the in-
side and the outside of the BIM model-space. In other words,
the Editor window, in which the Revit Door is edited, is Sieg-
ert’s mediating third: a transformative portal between building-
and object-model, holding together two screen-worlds of sim-
ulacra. Neither the Revit Door nor its Editor window opens
up onto the real in physical terms, but they do mobilize met-
rics of the real. In the case of the door, reality is accessed via
textual or numerical values (properties such as leaf thickness
are generally made to reflect the material constraints of real
doors, and can be linked to real manufacturer data). As for the
Editor window, its “lite” graphic operation of isolated editing
may reflect the physical exigencies of computer processing
time. This material reading of the Revit door reframes it once
more as a cultural technique, if we follow Siegert’s emphasis
on processual rather than ontological or as such definitions.24
Galloway has also theorized doors and windows as thresholds
that “achieve more the less they do,”25 and, finding doors and
Unnatural Ease
Above: Act III: Door Editor. Autodesk screen-
shots reprinted courtesy of Autodesk, Inc. and
appear under a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
22 A peripheral musing: it is interesting that
computer windows are called “dialogs,”
which seems to belie its non-discursive, one-
way parameter input. On the other hand,
are we not conversing with the machine?
Even the logic of Socratic questioning
seems on par with conditional yes-and-no /
if-and-then machine language…
23 BIM’s parametricism is not the
same impulse as the formally iterative,
Grasshopper-fuelled gymnastics of Greg
Lynn, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry.
BIM has more of a logistically fastidious
engineering sensibility that values the
informational integrity of an object. A
quote from Cecil Balmond, former Arup
deputy chairman and one of the most
prominent engineers in design discourse
alongside Ove Arup and Peter Rice, might
be apropos here, published the same year
Autodesk acquired Revit Technology
Corporation: “Now the computer opens
a door and gives unparalleled freedom to
explore—the result is a bewildering and
mind bending free-for-all where anything
goes. But cool new shapes and blobs are
nothing more than mere façade if they
are propped up by standard post and
beam constructions.” Cecil Balmond with
Jannuzzi Smith, informal (Munich, Berlin,
London, and New York: Prestel Verlag,
2002), 14.
24 Siegert follows up with this directive:
“We need to focus on how recursive
operative chains bring about a switch from
first-order to second-order techniques
(and back), on how nonsense generates
sense, how the symbolic is filtered out of
the real, or how, conversely, the symbolic
is incorporated into the real, and how
things/signifiers can exist because of the
interchange of materials/information
across the ever-emergent boundaries by
which they differentiate themselves from
the surrounding medium/channel.” Siegert,
Cultural Techniques, 13.
25 Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,”
in The Interface Effect, 25.
175

26 Ibid., 40.
27 “Family” is a bit of a misnomer, as it
can refer to a singular component as well
as a group of like components. To some
industry players, the Revit genealogy is all-
encompassing: “Just remember, everything
in Revit is a Family! :)” See James Parsons-
Moore, “The Revit Family Tree,” Graitec,
April 19, 2017, https://graitec.co.uk/blog/
entry/the-revit-family-tree.
28 A note on instantiation: Daston defines
the modern botanical type specimen as
“the foundation of a taxonomical pyramid
that links the individual plant to the
plant kingdom through ascending taxa
of ever greater generality; each level of
the hierarchy is typified by a designated
representative at the next lower level: the
species by the type specimen, the genus
by the type species.” While Revit Family
logic seems to follow the outline definition
of this late 19th century method, we also
see where the correlation departs. While
the type specimen and Revit’s Instance are
both unique, actually-existing things with
reference to broader kinds, Revit’s Instance
is a countable particular (DG-01, DG-02)
that defers to its general categories (the type
defines the instance), while the oxymoronic
type specimen is an accountable particular
(in the sense of a benchmark against which
other particulars are compared—the
instance defines the type). See Lorraine
Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific
Memory,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1
(Autumn 2004): 158, 164.
Left: A modern taxonomic hierarchy
diagram. This particular schema
appears to subsume “all life on earth.”
Courtesy University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.
Right: A concept diagram explaining Revit’s
Types and Instances parameters. Courtesy
BIM Manager.
29 It is worth noting that Walls and
their respective trimmings are not in
the same branch of Family as Doors
and Windows. While Doors are part of
“Loadable Families,” Walls are classified
as “System Families,” meaning they are
created inside the Revit project rather
than linked or imported from external
sources. This articulates the contradictory
metaphysics of Revit classification, where
the transcendent potential of the Door is
set apart from the immanence of the Wall.
Following Mies in the BIM era, God is in
the details, just not all of them.
30 See Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 9.
Siegert also specifically identifies “design
as a recursive chain of operations;” Siegert,
Cultural Techniques, 122.
31 Cecil Balmond: “A column is a point of
vortex, drawing down pools of load unto
itself.” Balmond with Smith, informal, 121.
176
PLAT 8.0
windows altogether insufficient to describe our present digital
condition, goes further to theorize the intraface: “an interface
internal to the interface [… that] is within the aesthetic.”26 This
is true of the Editor window: it is an intraface which allows one
to shuttle between model worlds while remaining immanent to
the Revit software.
Unlike early CAD interfaces, it is no longer the main
model-space that truly governs an object’s description. With
BIM, the project sidebar or pop-up dialog is where the defini-
tion of a species occurs. The Family Editor at once preserves
essential traits and possesses the power to change the evolu-
tionary course of its children.27 Might this be the space of Lor-
raine Daston’s type specimen28 for the parametric kingdom?
The nested informational hierarchy of a Family, too, echoes
that of modern biological classification.
To create a Revit Door is thus to rehearse some empir-
icist act of taxonomy. The above diagram demonstrates this
systematicity: an actually-existing, numbered “DG01” spec-
imen (Instance) in the model world is derived from a partic-
ular door identity/size (Type), kind (Family), and at its most
general classification, a door (Family Category). But the Door
(and other Families29 like Windows, Furniture, and Columns),
at its core, is not understood as a static, naturally-occurring
article, but comprises a reversible chain of parameter selec-
tions. That is to say, the visible thing is made up of recursive
processes of counting, reading, and writing. A recursive chain
of operations that articulates an ontology: this may be what
Siegert means by ontic operations.30
Yet BIM is not all action or correlation; the overwhelm-
ing thingness of building information modeling cannot be dis-
counted.31 Beyond merely “placing”32 doors within a building
model, as with CAD blocks and pre-BIM geometric artifacts,
Revit’s external Editor, pop-up Properties dialog, and load-
able .rfa family file, all invoke some divine transcendent site
wherein objects are actualized, before they are linked back
Amelyn Ng
Simplicity
into the main model. Do these digital meta-masters approach
the “pre-originary media”33 of chôra in Plato’s Timaeus, the
“space” or “receptacle of all becoming”?34 This move begins
to insulate software from critique.
Where does this leave us? It seems that the Door—like the
rest of Revit’s loadable families—has a stake in both construct-
edness and essentialism, drawing to itself opposite poles of the
philosophical spectrum seemingly without conflict. From this
arises the claim to a universal truth, with consequences not just
in the model-world but also in its referent (i.e. reality).35 How
can this be? That the parametric BIM object can be simulta-
neously all technique and all thing, a version and a template,
inside and outside history, seem to underscore a fundamental
aporia of our current information-rich technological milieu.
Galloway offers us a way forward: “The computer instantiates
a practice not a presence, an effect not an object.”36
The question at hand, then, is not one of ontology, but
of ethic: a relation of command that describes general princi-
ples for practice. Applied computational philosophy seems to
corroborate this production of generalized compliance. The
following definition is found in Ontology in the AEC Industry,
published in 2015 by the American Society of Civil Engineers:
“In computer and information sciences, ontology is a tech-
nical term denoting an artifact that is designed for a purpose,
which is to enable the modeling of knowledge about some do-
main, real or imagined.”37 The authors historicize this “pur-
pose” of simulation in a telling story of technical ambition and
consensus: “Since the mid-1970s, researchers…have recog-
nized that capturing knowledge is the key to building large
and powerful systems. […] In the 1980s, the Artificial Intelli-
gence community began to use the term ontology to refer to
both a theory of a modeled world and a component of knowledge
systems.”38 By 1998, this “ontology” was being theorized as a
“formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization;”
“a consensus rather than an individual view.”39 This could
easily describe BIM: a projective modeling ethic that could
simultaneously embody worlds and components, graphical
geometry and non-graphical data, concept and specification.
An increase in algorithmic detail and precision comes with a
decline in symbolic efficiency and a prioritizing of executabil-
ity over information aesthetics.40 As we opt for the “how” (or
the “how-to”) of our Revit objects, we lose our grip on the
“why” or the “what else”—not because they are ineffable or
“withdrawn,” per OOO parlance, but because there is no lan-
guage outside of its uniform (aest)ethic to describe them.41
At least not yet.42
Unnatural Ease
32 See “Place a Door,” by Autodesk Help,
Autodesk Knowledge Network, October 2,
2018, https://knowledge.autodesk.com/
support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/
CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/Revit-
Model/files/GUID-7E952007-8A5A-
4693-8E0F-A847F72F7617-htm.html.
33 See Louise Burchill, “In-between
Spacing and the ‘Chora’ in Derrida: A
Pre-originary Medium?” in Intermedialities:
Philosophy, Arts, Politics, ed. Henk
Oosterling and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
(Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011), 27-36.
34 See Donald Zeyl and Barbara Sattler,
“Plato’s Timaeus,” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017), ed.
Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2017/entries/plato-timaeus/.
35 This is no exaggeration: in technophilic
circles, BIM management itself has
been likened to a “single source of truth
(SSOT),” an information systems theory
which claims “no copies, no duplicates,
no ‘alternative facts;’” that is, objects
you can trust to be ontologically true.
See “BIMobject Talks – Single Source of
Truth,” YouTube video, 12:53, post by
BIMobject®, May 30, 2017, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ELF3wjomsfw.
36 Galloway, “The Computer as a Mode
of Mediation,” in The Interface Effect, 22.
37 Jia Niu et al, “Taxonomy Development
Toward the Domain Ontology,” in
Ontology in the AEC Industry: A Decade of
Research and Development in Architecture,
Engineering, and Construction, Raja R. A.
Issa and Ivan Mutis, eds. (Reston, VA:
American Society of Civil Engineers,
2015), 221. Emphasis added.
38 Ibid., 222. Emphasis added.
39 Ibid.
40 Galloway, “Are Some Things
Unrepresentable?,” in The Interface Effect, 86.
41 See Ibid., 85, 88. For discussions
on Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO),
see Todd Gannon, Graham Harman,
David Ruy, and Tom Wiscombe, “The
Object Turn: A Conversation,” Log 33
(Winter 2015): 73-94; and Slavoj Žižek,
“Afterword: Objects, Objects Everywhere,”
in Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism,
ed. Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),
177-192.
42 “The problem is that adequate
visualizations of control society have
not happened. Representation has not
happened. At least not yet.” Galloway,
“Are Some Things Unrepresentable?,” 91.
177
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