My dad's old drafting table vs. digital modeling. Night and day.

My pops was an architect back in the 80s. I remember his office had this huge drafting table with a lamp, rolls of vellum, and like a dozen different pencils he kept sharp. He'd spend hours on one building elevation. Fast forward to last month, I toured a new firm in Chicago. No tables, no paper. Everyone's got a tablet and they're tweaking 3D models in real time. The shift hit me when the lead designer said they can run a structural load test in 10 minutes now. That used to take him a week of math and drawing. What blows my mind is how AI handles all the repetitive stuff now, like laying out plumbing routes. I'm not saying it's bad, the buildings are better. But I wonder if we lost something in the craft. Anyone else seen a trade get completely flipped by this stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

cooper.reese15d ago

Yeah I read that some old school architects are switching to VR for walkthroughs now.

mason.mary15d ago

My buddy who runs a small firm in Austin started using VR for client walkthroughs about two years ago lol. He told me it cut down on revision requests by like 40% because people could actually see the space before it was built. I tried it once on a project of mine and honestly it helped catch a few scaling issues in the kitchen layout that I would have missed otherwise. The only downside is getting clients to actually put the headset on without complaining about motion sickness lmao.