How I Got Into CAD/BIM
How did you become interested in Architecture?
I was asked this recently, not by an architect, but a high school student who wants to become an architect.
The student went on to say that, as far as he could remember, he had been interested in architecture and buildings.
Of course, I don’t work in “Core” Architecture anymore — I currently run a training institute for CAD and BIM. But I have practiced architecture and still work as a consultant architect on a few projects a year.
Everyone has their own “architectural origin story” I suppose, so I thought about it and decided to pen down mine. This, I hope, will suffice as a form of “Introduction”.
I wasn’t one of those people who grew up and worked for my dad’s business, and I wasn’t born into a family of construction.
With the exception of building some log cabins with all types of woodwork, log-fitting etc, I really had had no architectural experience prior to college.I always liked to draw, build and read technical information, so in a sense, I did have a predisposition for it.
However, during my undergraduate studies, I dabbled in a variety of academic fields before settling on architecture.
This was the point at which I erroneously assumed you HAD to work in your major field.
First, I was immersed in international studies. Then I moved on to environmental science, which was fantastic because it encompassed three completely different subject areas (the three pillars of sustainability and all that).
From there, I became interested in studio art because environmental science seemed to have a predetermined answer to its own questions (I wanted to make up my own).
Then studio art became a little too strange for me, so I went to my academic advisor, who recommended architecture as a discipline that would cover all of the above, which I was still interested in, but not enough to study any of them alone.
So I transferred from my previous school, which didn’t have architecture, to one that did (for a BA in arch studies), and I applied for an M.Arch because I had grown to love the field.
The M.Arch was in computation, building lifecycle design, and related specializations that went on to be called BIM.
So it’s really not all that surprising that I now work in a technical field within architecture — computer aided design, building information modeling, automated quantity takeoff and estimation, and training for the above.
