ArchitectAnon

Oh right, sorry. Should I have linked to it? It seemed pretty relevant to this discussion and most of it was quoting something so I reused a lot of it. Didn't realise that was taboo.

I wrote a post below about how AI hallucinated a whole regulation that didn’t exist which has been flagged for some reason.

I have colleagues who have had arguments with clients who have asked AI questions about planning law and been given bullshit which they then insist is true and they can’t understand why thier architects won’t submit the appeal that they’re asking for.

I think we’re in an era where any text, true or not, is so easy to generate and disseminate that the status of the written word is reduced to the standard of the gossip that used to be our main source of information before the printing press was invented. Now half the internet is AI generated bullshit as well.

I was looking for a fire standard; there's a particular fire standard, BS 5824, that I don't have that is referenced on a manufacturers website, which they claim relates to fire curtains. For context, yesterday as an experiment, I asked Deepseek to summarise BS 5839 part 6, a standard I know quite well, and it did a pretty good job. Let's ask Deepseek to summarise BS 5824...

"*BS 5824:2013* is a British Standard titled "Wall and floor tiling – Design and installation of ceramic, natural stone, and mosaic tiling in normal conditions – Code of practice". It provides guidelines for the *design, materials, installation, and testing* of tiling systems in interior and exterior applications..."

What? OK let's check the standard on the website of the actual body that publishes them: BSIgroup.com

"BS 5824:1980 Specification for low voltage switchgear and controlgear for industrial use. Mounting rails. C-profile and accessories for the mounting of equipment... Cost £149"

Oh shit the manufacturer's website is completely wrong and so is AI. They literally have no clue what they are talking about. 1. Let's not specify their fire curtains in my building. 2. Don't trust the AI.

My conclusion: If the info you need to do your job is behind a paywall or only in expensive textbooks, then AI hasn't seen it and it will make something up that's probably wrong, and probably don't get it to write your website or you will look like an idiot...

If you hire a world famous architect and then start micromanaging their design they will walk away from the project and publicly tell everyone it’s going to be shit. They don’t want to be associated with something that is not their design; it’s bad for their brand.

When I’ve looked into this before for a client in Scotland, it seems the smallest size that made sense in terms of the factors other commenters have mentioned was about £50,000 to install. Also it requires planning permission which is much harder to get for a wind turbine than for solar PV which you can often install without getting explicit permission under ‘permitted development’ rules.

Everyone is missing the point. It's not the form of the conveyor that matters it's the loading and unloading system. You need a set of standardised parcel sized containers first. Then you can design robotic handling equipment that can load and unload them easily. You can take the containers and feed them into your postal system and gradually automate more parts of the system reliably once you have standard reusable containers, bonus points if the containers are collapsible like some crates you get for fresh produce. You can imagine them clicking magnetically into totems on the street where they could be collected robotically more easily. Or in high traffic locations you might feed them hole in the wall that takes them into an underground system of some kind that transports them to a rail or truck depot. You can also imagine that parcels services might be reintroduced on local trains because you don't need an extra person to load and unload the containers at stations if this can be done robotically. There are endless possibilities for varying degrees of automation, but the key thing is that there has to be a standard interface for picking up a container of a known size. The parcel is the interface; the physical specifications of the standard containers are analogous to an API.

The technology already exists for this in airports[0][1]; when you check in a bag in a big modern airport after the gate agent sticks the sticker on the handle it won't be touched again by a human until it gets chucked into the aircraft hold. Your bag goes through the curtain and it is dropped into a standard bucket which is conveyed around under the concourse on a rollercoaster like automated rail system to screening then either to an automated vehicle for transfer between terminal buildings or to an automated storage system for people who have checked in too early or have a long transfer, finally to the stand/ramp for loading into the aircraft. Big international airports like Amsterdam Schipol, Paris Charles de Gaul, Madrid Barrajas and Heathrow all have systems like this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVesQ07GrRY&list=PLWwq_41dNV... edit: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cac411oBqSE&t=57s

I would need to be able to talk and draw at the same time, which is how I interact with co-workers and clients.

Not sure I could fine a reference for that any more. I think I got it from an article or lecture by Richard Rogers years ago. He was a famously dyslexic architect and if I remember correctly was the patron of the British Dyslexia Association.

Yes but you are trading off a lot of people with a one kind of disadvantage, dyslexia, for the benefit of very very few people with a motor skills disability that affects their ability to draw or manipulate an input device which is a different disadvantage. What's the acceptable ratio? One handless person enabled for every 100,000 dyslexics sidelined? Is that fair? How do you work out an acceptable tradeoff?

It is not a given that everyone can or should be enabled to do everything possible at any cost; people in wheelchairs can't be firefighters and we don't make all old subway lines fully accessible because it is incredibly expensive.

Disadvantaging a huge number of people for the benefit of very few has a societal cost.

I think the thing that most perturbs me about AI is that it takes jobs that involve manipulating colours, light, shade and space directly and turns them into essay writing exercises. As a dyslexic I fucking hate writing essays. 40% of architects are dyslexic. I wouldn't be surprised if that was similar or higher in other creative industries such as filmmaking and illustration. Coincidentally 40% of the prison population is also dyslexic, I wonder if that's where all the spare creatives who are terrible at describing things with words will end up in 20 years time.

Offices have a lot more people per m² all of them using computer equipment continuously for 7hrs/day so in my experience they tend to have considerably higher cooling loads. I know from experience that a typical high rise office building in London, UK will have no heating requirement for most of the year; it is in cooling mode most of the time.

Like clippy for fire doors. "I've noticed you have moved this into a corridor where all the other doors have 1hr rating is the 30min rating on this door correct" Would be amazing but sounds a but too much from what we can expect from AI at the moment; we would start to rely on it and it would have to be 99.999% correct.

Yes and no. A full revision control system would be handy but would probably have the same issues with commit comments as in software. It could help filter stuff that has been touched but the software needs to be very intelligent about marking something as actually changed. E.g. If everything is parametrically linked should it get touched by a change? and its last modified date should bump? The visual diff could highlight a whole lot of non-relevant stuff as changed.

To your other question, yes it is possible to require a change in the specification of a door because the layout has changed elsewhere, e.g. it might need to become a 1hr fire door with a door closer because the layout of a corridor changed elsewhere and it now forms part of the protected escape route.

Solving this problem is complicated. You can't link the fire resistance of the door to the wall it is in though as it is common practice to specify 30min fire doors even where they are not needed as it is a good way to get a better quality generic heavy door without specifying a particular make and model so this parameter will be commonly overridden for reasons that are not 'semantically logical' but are eminently practical in the real world. Also the two are not necessarily related anyway because a wall might have different requirements driving its specification.

Modelling the voids not the things that contain them is one way to look at the problem. It might be possible to place a sort of virtual smoke bomb object in the corridor that will try to fill the space with virtual smoke and anything that 'smoke' touches needs to have say 30mins fire resistance. However this is complicated because in my jurisdiction you can have different fire resistances required for walls, doors and ceilings forming compartments... So your smoke bomb object would need to know if it was interacting with a door, a wall, a compartment ceiling or a false ceiling and determine wether to alert that something is wrong or pass through it as if it's not there... That is assuming that the space has been modelled tightly enough in the first place to ensure that the 'smoke' doesn't leak out.

Another example of this problem of semantics is reinforced concrete structures because you can make any shape you want out of concrete it might be a wall to one thing and a part of a foundation structure to another and part of a column structure at the same time. Semantically it is one piece of concrete but it is also all three of those other things for the purposes of modelling the structure. This is a tricky problem for software to solve because you usually model those elements individually but when you generate drawings they should all show up as one homogenous lump. What tends to happen is the software sometimes fails to merge things together and you end up troubleshooting a bunch of spurious lines all over your Plans Sections and Elevations.

Speaking as an architect who uses other BIM software than this ‘at the coal face’, I wanted to add a bit more of a real world example onto your explanation. BIM is a system which is meant to make the notes (semantic information) that are added to the industry standard diagrams (plans, sections and elevations)[0] stay pointed at the right thing with the right information in them. It also auto generates many of the lists of components that we use.

It makes some things easier; a quick video call to the engineer with a screen share of a 3d model to ask about something makes it much easier to talk about and resolve issues. It makes other things harder; generating the industry standard diagrams that we all use to analyse information is slower than just drawing them in 2d. You get 80% of the way there a lot faster but then you have to deal with all the situations that the software designers didn’t anticipate when they designed the wall, slab, roof, door and window tools and often the only way to do this is to drop objects back to ‘dumb’ geometry and rework them. You then have to go back to manually labelling them in the 2d 'diagrams' or trying to figure out how to tag them semantically with a specially generated tag so that they show up correctly in the auto generated schedules and notes. I personally find the BIM way of working more stressful as you never know when you are going to get caught out by a software glitch that halts your production, it is a lot more unpredictable than brainlessly slogging through drawing a bunch of 2d drawings. I think these are the challenges you are referring to.

So lets say I'm writing a 'Door schedule', a list of all the doors on the project, when I started my career you would go through a project with the paper plans and type up a list in excel with all the specifications manually, now when you place a door object it is tagged with various information which you can query to auto generate this list of doors. However, the doors will have been placed in the BIM model quite early on in the process when we were just thinking about where the doors needed to be and which way they opened. We were not thinking about which manufacturer they were from, what the finishes and hardware are going to be and fire ratings etc at that stage. So to get this list to autogenerate correctly you have to go back to each door and locate the correct fields from among hundreds of others in a clunky data entry interface to enter this information to get it to query correctly and show up in your list of doors. It is database data entry consistency problem. The list of all the doors shows up instantly; 2 mins work to get a list with all this detailed information set up. 2 hours later, I've managed to figure out the tagging system to get it to list the last weird edge case on door D25. I could have typed the whole thing faster in excel, but now that the information is there, it is tagged to that door and as long as no-one duplicates it and moves it to another location the door schedule will still be correct... So every time you re-issue this schedule, you still need to go through it door by door and check against the plan to see what its specification needs to be and check if it is still correct. You can't trust the automatic door schedule to be correct in case somebody with ADHD (a lot of architects including me) forgot to check and edit all the semantic information after they made the visual change they wanted.

Separating the process of adding written information to the drawing from the process of drawing the thing has always been a problem with CAD but with BIM it is even worse because there is a greater disconnect. In my experience BIM reduces problems with geometry not being correctly thought out and things not fitting together but it increases problems with mislabelled information because there is a greater mental distance between the thing you edit and where the information eventually ends up being presented.

I'm a software minded person I have a >20k LOC python BIM customisation project I've written myself and I've coded some embedded C in the past but I struggle to get the semantic tagging to work efficiently; it is much slower than just going to the 2d output drawing and adding a dumb note. I've coded my own BIM door and window objects for my CAD package to try and streamlines this and when I can use them they way I want to it works great, but I do find myself going back and coding more features on pretty much every project I work on to allow for a situation I hadn't anticipated when I first wrote the code.

It also raises an ethical issue if you are billing hourly because how many hours of troubleshooting your own BIM software can you reasonably bill for?

BIM has the same issues as other areas where bureaucracy has been computerised into a rigid process; it is very poor at edge cases and buildings are full of these. CAD software really needs a huge investment in deep interaction design psychology and research to resolve these issues.

[0]These are never going away because the are a very efficient abstraction to use for analysis and they need a clear presentation to be readable; you wouldn't ask an electrical engineer to give up circuit diagrams in favour of a 3d model.

A lot of this analysis is purely about style, not substance. It's a discussion of what font the website uses, not whether it's useful and easy to navigate website. We should be evaluating buildings based on wether they are in the right place in the first place, wether it creates a walkable setting, wether you can find the front door easily, wether you can navigate around the building easily, wether they are energy efficient, wether they provide a healthy internal environment... etc. What decorations you stick on the outside are kind of the last thing to worry about. For example, the main problem with the brutalist building with the caption 'Some people like this building, some do not. But all must experience it' is scale, not style, if you chopped off the top five floors and left only three storeys, it would be much more acceptable in its setting. A lot of the problems with brutalist architecture are less to do with the style of materials and more a failure to address basic design issues like signalling 'where's the front door?'.

>And let's not forget, a lot of traditionalist design took into account a world without HVAC and other hacks. If you want energy efficiency, looking to solutions that tackled the problem in a more fundamental way is a good thing, rather than papering over the problem with technology.

A lot of these houses were heated with a coal fire in every room, they are completely uninsulated and sitting anywhere near the window in the dead of winter would be very cold! There is something to be said for applying modern passive solar design techniques, insulation and airtightness coupled with heat recovery ventilation. Of course, this does mean you can only have big Georgian style windows on south(ish) facing facades.

Go to Architecture school for 5 years. Tutors used to keep scores over how many students they could make cry. Anything else will seem tame in comparison. At the end of it you come to think of your work as something you can discard at a moment’s notice, you’ll have no sentimental attachment to it at all, if anything you’ll slightly hate it already anyway.

This article is talking about prefabricated single family homes i.e trailers. For environmental reasons you don’t want massive trailer parks because they generate huge transport carbon emissions from intensive vehicle use; cities need denser housing than these can provide. In a trailer park fire safety is achieved by having a space all around each trailer as a fire break. You can’t stack lightweight traileresque pods easily because they don’t contain enough materials with the thermal properties to resist fire spread between apartments because these materials are typically heavy and brittle. The most efficient and cost effective of these materials is drywall which is not well suited to construction where you transport and then lift the finished item into position.

Fully welded sheet steel mineral wool sandwich panels could work but they are a lot more expensive than drywall and need to be carefully designed to avoid corrosion issues from condensation. Lightweight fire resistance can be acheived with intumescent coatings but these are expensive and designed for structural fire protection not for preventing fire spread.

Here's my perspective on this as an Architect: Most construction details have been done before, they could be easily reproduced by an AI surely? There's usually just a few things that are different from the last time I have drawn it. A few 3D interactions with other components that need to be reasoned about. They are not that complicated individually.

But yet I see this problem as well just using old fashioned automation let along AI to save time. I find that if you haven't drawn the 2D section through all the different edge cases of a particular thing you are trying to design, you haven't done the analysis and you don't really understand what's happening. I've made mistakes where I've been working in 3D on something complicated and I've had to hide some element to be able to view what I'm working on, only to find later that when I turn everything on again I've created a clash or something impossible to build. That's why we still do 2D drawings because they are an analysis tool that we've developed for solving these problems and we need to do the analysis, which is to draw section cuts through things, as well as building 3D models. After all, if models were such a good way to describe buildings, then why weren't we just building physical scale models and giving them to the builders 100 years ago; it's because you can't see the build-up of the layers and you can't reason about them.

Reading this article I get the same sense about software engineering, if you haven't solved the problem, you don't really understand the code the AI is generating and so you don't really know if it is going to do what you've tried to describe in your prompt. You still have to read the code it's generated and understand what it is doing to be able to tell if it is going to do what you expect.

Yes, insulate as well. But a person living in a single glazed warehouse conversion with no insulation but next to a tube stop and a food shop will use quite a bit less energy overall than a person who lives in a passive house but has to drive 10miles to work. Restoring walkable town centres and discouraging car use in towns and cities that worked fine before cars would save more energy and would be quicker and less disruptive than trying to insulate every old victorian house. Insulating old houses is technically hard to do right and different houses need different solutions. If it’s done badly it will cause health problems from black mould and structural problems from condensation causing timber joists and rafters to rot where they pass through the insulation into the masonry walls.

Tunnel boring machines aren't that expensive per km. They are robotic worms that take a few dozen people to operate. If you do cut and cover you will end up with a similar problem to the tram system in Edinburgh where there were a lot of pipes and cables under the street that were uncharted and not as deep as everyone expected. Dealing with old pipes and cables is very delicate; it involves a lot of careful hand digging with shovels and picks and then careful propping to avoid damaging the old clay drain pipe / ancient electricity cable / iron gas main / water main etc. All of these can be lethal if they are damaged and they all have to be worked on by hand. Super expensive.

Technical drawings and visuals

Or maybe it’s a form of abstract ‘high art’ like jazz and you don’t understand it. I studied architecture and I understand how to interpret what these designers were trying to do with the opportunities provided by the new technology of reinforced concrete. There was a lot of hubris in the post war period and a lot of experimental stuff was built. Some examples are poor designs, some are incredible.

Here’s an example: In the 80’s, in London and elsewhere in the UK, plenty of brutalist towers were demolished and replaced with more traditional brick two story houses, only for the residents to realise that they had taken a big downgrade to smaller darker houses, and were still living in a community with the same social problems as before that people said would be fixed by changing the style of architecture.

Brutalist architecture is a branch of modernism, like jazz and abstract paintings. Most of it is experimental, some of it is shit design and sticking plastic ionic columns on it wouldn’t fix it. I don’t think you can seriously dismiss the whole genre as the product of mental illness.

Hire an architect. Find the directory of registered architects in your state or country, browse through the listings and chose a few that are within a hour or so of your location that do work that you like. For each architect, choose some houses on the architect’s website and ask if they will put you in touch with the owners and if they would be happy to show you around one of them. Ask the architect what went wrong and how they dealt with it. (Something goes wrong on every project). You should get a good feel for if the architect is someone you can work with from this process, you will be in a relationship with them for at least a year and a half and building is expensive and stressful. If you hire an architect for a full service they will also take care things like permits, sourcing some reliable contractors to choose from, quality control for the build process.

Ask your architect to show you visuals of what the house will be like, I guarantee you you can’t read plans like we can. They don’t need to be hyper expensive realtime ray traced renderings, if your architect works in 3D you can sit with them a look at the computer model we work with day to day, that’s enough to understand what it will be like.

Designing a house with an absolutely fixed budget is only possible if you are building a new build house on a flat serviced site and you give a minimal brief and don’t change it after the outline design and you allow a contingency. This practically never happens. After giving you a lowball hard limit on how much they have to spend I draw them a small house and pretty much all clients like to make their houses bigger as the project progresses. I always warn clients that they are going over budget because of extra floor area and I warn them not to get bamboozled into choosing insanely expensive kitchens and finishes by salespeople, but it still happens on most projects. Don’t make last minute design changes, someone will make a mistake and it will cause a cascade of changes that will cost you more or compromise the design. Don’t base your idea of what a decent budget in $/sqft is on what your neighbour self built 15 years ago, or what someone on a TV program about building houses said; the neighbour typically omits lots of costs when telling them how much their build cost e.g. groundworks, services connections, etc. Likewise the budgets people say on TV are usually absolute bullshit. Also remember that your architect doesn’t have total control over the price; what you get quoted by the contractor is what they think the market will bear and this can change considerably over the course of the 6-12 months it will take to get your permissions and finalise the detailed design.

ADS-B information is broadcast unencrypted in real time from every civilian aircraft all the time. Anyone can receive this information with easily available equipment and tell everyone about it on a website. I don’t think it’s technically possible to censor this information. If you’re worried about someone shooting you down or whatever then you’re going to have to find a different way to counter this. Maybe fit countermeasures or buy another two planes and keep people guessing which one you are on. But it seems overly paranoid TBH.

It’s nothing to do with imposing ‘far left’ ideology. It’s physics. A dense urban neighbourhood of uninsulated housing that supports most trips by walking and public transport is more energy efficient than a passvihaus located somewhere that requires driving. Once built that suburban house has an ongoing and high transportation energy cost for maybe hundreds of years. Obviously if your political ideology is Green you are against wasting energy.

Incredibly unlikely for any part of the structure to have been designed by an architect, most likely a highly specialist subcontractor design item. Our insurance would not cover it and it is illegal for architects to practice without insurance in many EU countries. The closest any architect would get to this is to go to a big fish tank company and say I want a big fish tank with diameter x and height y, can you do it and how much will it be...

Not sure about Germany but in the UK the designers would be unlikely to still be liable anymore under the original contract to design this, liability under the contract would be up to 12 years from when the work under the contract was completed. They might be liable in tort for professional negligence but it's much harder to prove that this has occurred especially after 20 years. More likely the company that was under contract to inspect/maintain this will get hammered.

The headline is misleading. They are saying that it seems to have failed due to some kind of mysterious fatigue failure at a wood to steel structural interface. The investigators are struggling to work out how because the timber was damaged when it hit bottom of the river and then damaged further when it was hauled out for inspection. The overloading in the headline seems to refer to the ‘load shedding’ to other structural members that will have occurred after the joint (or joints) failed. (I’m not a structural engineer, but my profession is closely related.)

They are legally required in the primary bedroom of all new build houses in Scotland, possibly also in England and Wales.