ARCHITECTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Information technologies and the construction industry are coming together in ways once unimaginable, and their union is changing what people do inside buildings, as well as how buildings are designed and built.

"I don't like to use cliché words like revolution," says Hans C. Bjornsson, director of Stanford's Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE), a world leader in the application of information technologies to the construction industry. "But it is a revolution."

For the last 200 years, the basic construction paradigm has been the factory, created for masses of people to work together to make complicated products.

"That paradigm has been applied not only to the workplace, but also to homes, schools and most other types of buildings," Bjornsson says. "Industrial society has created high-rise apartment buildings as human warehouses so that people can live near their workplace. Even the interior design of our homes has been influenced: subdivided, like factories, into a series of special purpose rooms - kitchen, dining room, living room, television room, sewing room, bedroom.

"Now that paradigm is changing," he says. With the rise of the virtual workplace, physical proximity is becoming ever less essential. "The big research question today," Bjornsson says, "is what kind of building will we be building in the next century?" Perhaps lots of meeting places, he suggests.

Digital Architecture

"After all, the web is an electronic meeting place, but we will need physical meeting places as well."
Until recently, the construction industry has been relatively untouched by new technologies. The environment is basically what it was 50 years ago: drawings and information on paper. Experts have been predicting for 20 years that digital technology will begin penetrating the building trades, but only now has it reached the stage where the convergence of computer, telephone and television could reduce costs of design and construction by as much as 30 percent.