This day, July 1, in 1991 was a milestone for me personally and professionally. That Sunday morning, in an almost empty auditorium at Nehru centre at Mumbai, I received the JIIA (Journal of Indian Institute of Architects) special award for excellence in architectural research for a simple mathematical taxonomy I had proposed for architecture This note should be useful for architects and students here in Facebook. I hope that they would understand, read and participate. A much bigger event happened just the day after, on July 3, 1991 -- That event did not happen to me; but it was extremely significant and changed the nature of the Information era considerably. Its significance is very well understood now, and I hope to use that event to convince the audience here to participate. I will request you to read till the end of this note to understand the impact and meaning of the July 3 event. Pardon for the length of this note. I believe in Einsteins saying: Make things simple as possible, but not simpler ... so sometimes, such lengthy notes are needed :-) I have been putting up notes similar to this on most first of July, and I am thankful for the growing friends/well-wishers who have joined all of us who are already on this journey. That little award gave me the impetus to doggedly pursue this line of investigation regarding representation of architecture. I didnt realize it then, but it so happened I was one of the small coterie of researchers in the world who was looking for meaning in architectural representation. This way of looking at architecture is nowadays called BIM (Building Information Modeling) but didnt have a clever term then The software that I wrote, TAD (The Architects Desktop) is possibly the oldest BIM software in the world -- although some may attribute that to Archicad, I believe Archicad had BIM like capability only later. The first version of TAD was in DOS, in 1989 This has been my central magnificent passion and focus all these years, quite unwaveringly. My contribution has been into early stage of design, and how to look at the built-environment using a geometrical spatial system. Because of its fractal nature,the representation is highly efficient. Designs can now be objectively plumbed for information as the architect hazily works on bubble diagrams, etc. and all the way into the final stages of design too This work has not happened in a vacuum. Others have worked on similar approaches, but nothing that resulted in a complete representation system. Mine is possibly the only complete one that gives equal credence to delineate spaces as well as built-matter. It is an intricate yet easily understandable topic (if you devote a bit of time). The journey thus far has been exhilarating indeed. The journey is picking up more pace and excitement hereon. Lots of people helped me on this journey, and I have a list of them on my website. See my blog for an article on the initial stage of the journey of this work sf.sabufrancis/2013/02/the-story-of-tad.html With Syncspace the new company that has been co-founded by me and Across & Beyond Development Consultancy; I am very sure this journey, with sufficient participation and understanding from fellow architects, students and IT professionals, will reach a wonderful destination. We have even procured a significant investment and development partnership with a big IT player (official announcement soon) What is extremely curious, is that for some reason, many architects are still assuming that the way of talking of buildings -- using drawings, is still assumed to be the only way to talk about buildings. Usage of drawings was invented during the Renaissance, almost 600 years or so back. This approach has served its purpose and is now proving to be a hinderance. The way of using drawings for talking about buildings, need not be discarded entirely. However, one MUST respond to the holistic nature of the kind of problems that we face today in architecture. That has been amply demonstrated by many events in recent architectural history Climatology, ecology, building-materials, behaviour of people all need to be holistically discussed today if one has to realistically design. Time is indeed ripe for a mature new way of looking at architectural design. We at Syncspace, are of the opinion that even conventional BIM is also insufficient So what happened just the day after the next day, on July 3? On that day, a young student had put up an earnest message on Usenet. It read : Hello netlanders, Due to a project Im working on (in minix), Im interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice. That simple plea was by a young Linus Trovalds, which led to lots of people joining Linus from all over the world to help in the creation of Linux, the first Unix like open-source Operating System. Now everyone knows it has had a deep impact on the evolution of the Internet, Information Technology and possibly our very life itself! For e.g. Android phones came about due to this operating system Any Operating System would have a deep impact because as per Karl Marxs terminology it is a mother machine and it leads to significant ripples across society. So I can understand the impact Linux led to A new representation system is even deeper than an operating system. The bowstring is stretched even further back and so the arrow would fly even faster, and more focused. It is like discovering a new set of alphabets . According to me (and a growing number of people) the TAD way of looking at buildings can lead to a more accurate and responsible way of looking at architecture and I can see lot of beneficial ripples right across society I am hoping to raise serious questions on how one designs buildings all over the world. Twenty Five years have gone into this and a lot of checks and vetting has been done; including two significant research projects with IIT Bombay on energy calculations So here is my appeal: In 1991, there was no Internet in India. I wanted people to participate and I was willing to let anyone join in on my journey. I had made copies of my treatise that I had given to IIA and sent those by snail mail to architects I thought could contribute. But I could make only 10 copies or so. I wish I had Usenet then ... maybe I could have attracted a lot more people. Percentage wise, Linus got an extremely small percentage of people who joined him. but since Usenet sprayed the message to millions of people, Linus got a sufficiently pregnant number. That kind of participation is not possible if the audience I had exposed my work to was very small; so the distribution of my treatise in 1991 to around 10 architects produced no results those days. It has been a big struggle for me -- and sometimes I ended up doing sisyphus tasks like getting drawn into comparisons with Autodesks Autocad and Revit, etc. ... as if one has to bow in front of brands before doing anything original! So it is my earnest request once again, for architects and students of architecture to join us at Syncspace in this revolution in the making. At the very least, we would be asking potent questions in the field of architecture -- and most likely we would also get some very useful answers. I have been very transparent about my work. My softwre itself is free -- see ww3.teamtad We do have a revenue model,where we want to grow along with others who will also grow with us The internal software architecture of this work is being finalized and much of it would now be open-sourced for others to build on. There is a lot that still needs to be done. This is no longer a one man show. Syncspace now has a rich set of solutions that utilizes the TAD intellectual property We need architects and student interns who can understand both the challenge and opportunity here. We need those who can accurately document our work, marketing experts, researchers. If you cannot join us, you can always use our work and give us valuable feedback. If you have any other suggestion, please do not hesitate to come with those Coders and UI experts are not needed right now, as that department has been setup. But we surely will have API (Application Programming Interface) for developers to build on our work -- but that would come a bit later I would appreciate if comments to this note are not used for job-enquiries or other official work. Please contact me here on Facebook via private chat message, or on my email sabu@syncspace Please do share this note with architecture related communities and groups
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:54:15 +0000
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