Global architecture firm Gensler has launched a new digital design tool that aims to supercharge design workflows by "combining information metrics and geometry form finding."
The tool, named Blox, is part of the firm's inFORM suite of "internally developed proprietary products" created to help propel the firm's overall design capabilities. A LinkedIn post published by Joseph Joseph, Partner and Global Director, Design Technology Studio at Gensler, highlights the new technology, which was developed through the Gensler Research Institute initiative.
Joseph writes, "We believe that our craft as designers is founded on these superpowers that are innately human and irreplaceable by technology. As such, we believe that we stand to gain significantly by combining our human superpowers with compute cognition to achieve our infinite possibilities thus elevating our value to a much higher purpose in the world."
According to the post, Blox can help designers develop massing designs that include programmatic designations at the master plan scale while also offering preliminary budget estimates for construction, parking, and other project elements, among the tool's many capabilities.
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With GoogleX's Flux turned into a BIM add-in rather than a game-changing AI-powered package it had initially been touted to be, this is a welcome addition to the field.
I trust Gensler to make sure this "design tool" is design-forward as opposed to revenue-forward.
Really.
I do.
i think they've already answered the question with their multiple rounds of massive layoffs... never let a crisis go to waste!
Wait, doesn't this look very similar to https://envelope.city/ ?
Actually, it seems similar but with added functionality. Very similar to the Modelur plugin for sketchup.
There's definitely a growing suite of "smart" products around. Autodesk is advertising its so-called machine learning Revit plugin too.
No different than this really.
and in the end they take a look at their spreadsheet and choose whichever option maximises their profits...
no, it's even more distressing. They take a look at their spreadsheet and choose whichever option maximize their CLIENT'S profits.
Does this "achieve our infinite possibilities thus elevating our value to a much higher purpose in the world"?
I don't know how to evaluate that ridiculous proposition. But it seems like a nice tool that could save dozens of hours of work on some projects.
What I'd want to know that isn't addressed here is how it knows what the building envelope, site coverage, parking ratios etc are. Because it's the collection and understanding of disparate information that really slows things down sometimes. I expect this will get added to the long list of technical solutions that pretend to do much more ambitious things than they actually can.
These are indeed the local variables I suspect a tool like this wouldn't be able to handle. GoogleX's Flux was supposed to incorporate all the elements you mentioned in a single interface - so developers and architects can oush sliders and check boxes to generate a full building massing. They even claimed to be working on optimizing MEP and views in a single piece of software. Unfortunately the project seemed to have fizzled out after their Austin debut, though it has been resurrected with VC funding but in a much more limited scope. I suspect the technology is there but the returns are simply not worth the R&D. After all, who is going to buy this software if it indeed can boast all kinds of local ordinances and codes? Can architects afford it and integrate it with their workflow? Can developers use it in lieu of architects altogether?
All your base are belong to us
I've witnessed old dudes to same with CAD and Excel...
Joseph writes, "We believe that our craft as designers is founded on these superpowers that are innately human and irreplaceable by technology. As such, we believe that we stand to gain significantly by combining our human superpowers with compute cognition to achieve our infinite possibilities thus elevating our value to a much higher purpose in the world."
Plain weird!
This looks to be simply a copy of the native Revit Massing capability which I would think a firm the size of Gensler already has a few thousand seats sitting in front of a few thousand trained users. Why rewrite that on a minor platform used by less than 5% of the profession, and if you need to use grasshopper to drive it, substantially less than that. Why incur the initial cost and the maintenance of a capability you already have a in abundance? Where is the 'compute cognition', where is the AI (as it has been tagged), where is the machine learning. If it has these things what is in the training data set, how big was it?
How does putting various multipliers in a pretty spreadsheet elevate Gensler's value to a 'purpose' higher than its competitors, and if somehow it did, why would you announce it here for them all to see?
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