WHAT IS CONVERGE/CONVERGENCE IN

ARCHITECTURE
•What Architects Should Know About
"Convergence"

•Randy Deutsch's book explores how the

rapidly blurring boundaries between design
and construction are changing the building
industry.
•he wrote
Convergence: The Redesign of Design
(Wiley, 2017), he heard again and again
from industry experts that “things in the
AEC industry were converging, without
anyone alluding to why or how or what that
meant. When I hit the thousand mark, I
said, ‘I’m going to have to write about this.’
”
Convergence explores how today’s software design tools, particularly Building
Information Management (BIM), are enabling architects, contractors, and other team
members to share and contribute to one digital model, reducing inefficiencies and
encouraging collaboration.

Deutsch is an architect and clinical associate professor at the School of Architecture at

the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He imagines a future in which the
boundaries between the design and construction industries have not only fuzzy but
vanished. “It’s not just that things are speeding up, but that they are moving toward
each other: they’re converging,” he writes. “The operative word is connection: the
connecting of experts to move projects forward faster.”
More Time For Intuition
As architects move into a more data-driven realm, will creativity decline? Deutsch doesn’t think
so. Instead, he writes, quick access to data “eliminates paths that don’t lead anywhere …The
beauty of gathering and leveraging data in building projects is that it enables designers to save
time and valuable resources by eliminating false positives.”

In the past, Deutsch says, data versus intuition was an either/or proposition: two
different ways to go about design. Now, he says, “We have both. The feedback
we get in BIM or in other computational tools both informs our intuition and at
the same time improves it. I think there’s a concern that with the focus on
technology that architecture will become too rational and machine-like. We need
the art and intuition, but we also need the data to back up those insights.”
Beyond Integrated Design
Many things have fostered increased collaboration among architects, builders, and other subcontractors: the
attempt to build more energy-efficient buildings, for instance. But Deutsch says convergence is a fundamentally
different mindset.
“Convergence ignores boundaries,” he writes of project team members and their roles, “whereas integration just
moves them.” As an example, the author cites two projects by the Toronto-based firm Partisans: the Bar Raval and
Grotto Sauna (both completed in 2016). “Their design process could be described as more emergent than linear or
integrated,”
he explains.
Deutsch believes that less hierarchical future will be empowering to millennials and younger workers. “Anytime
you’re working on interdisciplinary teams, your titles are less important,” he explains. “In that environment, it
doesn’t matter where the idea comes from. Everybody is working for the project. You’re able to let go of the titles
and the specific roles you have.
A sensual environment, its serene landscape reminds the temporary dwellers of the harmony that exist
beyond human possibilities. When PARTISANS team met on site, with a new client for designing and
constructing a potential Sauna, they knew that their most prominent challenge was to make a free-standing
structure that not only respected, but also matured from the context.
•the design. Grottos, historically,
have been known as natural or
artificial caves that are embedded
deep behind the curvature of
streams, and thus discovered by
those who would take the time to
explore.

The team scanned the rock, using a 3D laser

scanner to create multiple CNC’d models in
differing scales and materials. Subsequently, an
unconventional process of design-play took place,
and everyone in our studio collaborated in
sculpting the Grotto. Out of roughly fifteen
completely different ideas only 4 made the most
sense; and the clients—adventurous at heart—
selected a scheme that presented both excitement
and challenges for the team.
As a free-standing sauna, the Grotto uses two high
performance ovens that ensure efficiency and • Together, we developed a new process of fabrication;
control. There are vents and fans in-place that utilizing state of the art 3-D technology to scan, model
allow the building to breathe seasonally and and build the Grotto. The process led to a new-found
understanding for the properties of materials. Creating
prevent rot or mold in the structure. The rest of the illusion of a carved interior, we formed the specially
the systems were based on controlled air flow. We selected cedar timber into panels with parallel grains
used insulation on the building to not only protect
its components from heating up or cooling down
too quickly, but also to make the Grotto more
energy efficient.
 More Mergers
Will the future bring more hybrid firms, such as combined architecture-construction firms? Deutsch
thinks so. While he cautions that convergence is separate and different from consolidation, he says that
“it is important to point out that mergers and achievements inform one another and therefore serve as a
factor that brings about convergence, in that they ease access to information and resources.”

CONCLUSION

Convergence imagines a future increasingly given to generative design, where architects set the desired
architectural outcomes and parameters, but then allow the software to create a variety of design options. “We
are at the edge of [a] new era where computation is no longer a tool to support or aid the design process, but
rather where computation becomes itself a method for design,”
Why is it highly likely that there will be a convergence between enterprise & building architectures?
There are already strong signs that building and enterprise architecture are starting to converge:

The focus of building architecture has often been about the design of a particular building, but increasingly building architects
design much more than just the building itself, by taking into account the environment and social contexts surrounding the
location of a specific building.

In a similar fashion, the focus of EA has grown - from its origins in the domains of application, data, technologies and
computing.Now EA has a much broader scope - encompassing the purpose of an enterprise (business / government / non-profit
/ charity / etc.); its related operational models, products, services and processes; aspects of management and leadership,
including strategy planning, capabilities, and organisation design; and increasingly the environmental and social context
surrounding a specific enterprise (including the use of Internet technologies, but also through the interconnectedness of
economic, political, social, and other environmental systems).