A former coworker of mine at SALA Architects introduced me to The Avett Brothers’ music a few years ago. I’ve since become a huge fan. They recently came out with a new album on September 11th and I bought it right away.

Being fairly exhausted and worn out from my life these past few years, I find that working 8-10 hrs a day is difficult. And while I’m horrible at taking breaks and relaxing, I’m trying. Fortunately this September was perfect. The weather was a combination of almost chilly, cloudy, and occasionally a little damp. The leaves were gathering on the ground, the smell of Fall was in the air. And since this was Minnesota there was the occasional icy gust of wind, signalling that Winter was not far off either. Perfect weather for melancholy walks listening to a great new melancholy album.

There’s a lot of reasons why I enjoy The Avett Brothers, but one of my favorite things is that they sing essentially about three things. Across seven studio albums and a handful of EPs and Live albums, almost all their songs are about Death, Girls, or Family (and sometimes about all three). And you know what? If they write another 70 albums singing about just those three things, I’ll gladly buy all of them.

Does that work for Us?

I’m not really sure I have an answer to this question. Can architects base their careers on just a few simple principles? On a few themes? I think the answer is probably yes, though we need to be careful about what those themes are. Randy Deutsch hints at this in his wonderful article for Design Intelligence. (side note: Randy’s thoughts on continuous education are a must read).

I do know that there are two themes we can’t base our careers on:

Sustainability and BIM.

I see these twin interests of Sustainability and BIM not as fads, but as motifs that need to be subsumed into how we work. In 2020 or 2030, when someone asks what does every architect do, the answer will include sustainability and BIM. And a lot of other things.

Now sustainability is for someone else to discuss, so let’s focus on BIM in this context. We talk about integration with other members of the AEC team, but we also need to think about making BIM invisible within our own work. It should be everywhere and nowhere. It needs to be incorporated into our design process, our documentation process, our visualizations, our communications, our everything. It’s not about taking over these processes, making them something unrecognizable. Quite the opposite. It’s about merging, unification, and intelligence.

We have intelligent models. Why not intelligent renderings (like Maxwell Render has). Why not intelligent diagrams? Why not all that and more? I don’t know. I’m going to keep talking about BIM and ArchiCAD a lot here and elsewhere, but it’s time to also start dreaming about the future.