The Advent of the New Architectural Profession through BIM

Abstract

The profession of architecture mainly involves the construction of building information; this is achieved within the knowledge paradigm of our society. Therefore, a shift in the knowledge paradigm can lead to the advent of new architectural professions; the Renaissance and the current era are periods of such shifts. However, during the process of such a shift, it is difficult to notice the essential nature of the change, such as the emergence of a new architectural profession utilizing building information modeling (BIM). This study is unique in that it uses the correlation of building information with knowledge to uncover the essential nature of the architectural profession. Furthermore, Nonaka’s knowledge creation process (SECI) model is used to reveal the knowledge paradigm of our society. The analysis results show that knowledge creation in society has increased explosively since it has become possible—through the printing revolution of the Renaissance period—to share knowledge that previously remained at the experience level. Accordingly, this has led to the advent of an architectural profession involving today’s intellectuals, who can construct and express building information by using conceptualized knowledge rather than experience. Nowadays, machines have emerged as new agents of knowledge processing through the digital revolution, innovatively strengthening connections between information silos. As a result, a new architectural profession has emerged, focused on improving the performance of buildings by using simulations with machine-readable building information as well as with one’s own knowledge. Further, this new architectural profession, by harnessing the newly developed hybrid intelligence of machines and humans, is expected to overcome the former limits of the profession.

1. Introduction

We are living in a period of transition. Social changes caused by technological advancements are occurring very rapidly [1]. Furthermore, new changes are occurring in many traditional professions, even before people have understood the great tide of change known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution [2]. Therefore, the question arises—how will the architectural profession change?

The main task of the architectural profession is constructing a building’s information before it is built; this process has a very long history. However, in the early years, this process developed without clarification of the roles and main agents for a very long time. The architectural profession was specialized in the way it is today during the Renaissance [3].

An architectural profession has emerged in the theory-based knowledge domain, in contrast to the traditional profession, which was perceived to be in the experiential domain due to the influence of humanism during the Renaissance [3]. Since then, the architectural profession has been changing continuously, but its essential nature has not changed in that the main agents of work are humans.

In the modern era, this trend is facing a shift. In addition to humans, who were once the sole agents for processing building information, machines have emerged as the new main agents. Furthermore, tasks such as building information modeling (BIM)—which can make building information that used to be only human-readable machine-readable—have emerged. Such a shift is inevitable for providing a reliable and sustainable exchange of information [4] (p. 5).

However, it is not easy to grasp the essential nature of the change during the shift process. This is because people usually try to grasp the new change based on the previous trend. One clear example is the way the old generation understands the emergence of a new architectural technique such as BIM. However, a revolutionary shift, such as the paradigm shifts of the Renaissance and today, draws a line against the previous paradigm and requires an understanding of the new paradigm. The emergence of BIM should be understood as a paradigm shift, whereby the building information that used to be human-readable becomes machine-readable [5]. Otherwise, if it is understood as a more advanced 3D modeling method than used previously, people may work without an essential understanding [6] and falsely believe that BIM causes redundant work.

This study aims to clarify the essence of the newly emerging architectural profession to reduce this misunderstanding. To show the pattern of change more concretely, a comparison is made with the Renaissance, which was similar to the present day in many aspects [1]. The Renaissance will help to understand the background of the emergence of the new architectural profession and the essential nature of the traditional architectural profession that has continued to this day. Furthermore, this study makes a unique attempt to examine the correlation of building information with knowledge as a means of revealing the essence of the architectural profession. As a framework for analyzing the knowledge paradigms of the two periods, the Renaissance and today, we will use the socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (SECI) model to analyze the knowledge creation process.

2. Materials and Methods

The construction of building information, which is the main role of the architectural profession, is closely correlated to knowledge. Using knowledge, an architect finds the answers to questions regarding which principles are to be used to construct the building information and how to validly support the constructed information [7]. Accordingly, the architectural profession becomes a part of the current knowledge paradigm and is greatly affected in situations where a large amount of knowledge is learned and used (Figure 1).

Therefore, this study makes the following assumptions—while focusing on the relationship between building information and knowledge—in order to identify the essence of the architectural profession.

Assumption 1.

The main task of ① the architectural profession is the construction of ② building information.

Assumption 2.

The construction principle of ② building information is based on the ③ knowledge of an era.

Assumption 3.

① The architectural profession varies depending on the relationship between ② building information and ③ knowledge.

As the basic assumptions suggest, the relationship between the building information and knowledge, which affects the architectural profession, is formed within the knowledge paradigm. Based on the definition provided by Thomas Kuhn (who first proposed the concept of the paradigm), a paradigm can be understood as “a collective framework or a set of concepts that govern an era”. Kuhn also stated that such a “paradigm shift is not caused by a gradual progress based on the accumulation of truth but by revolution, i.e., a discontinuous rupture” [8]. Then, what is the revolution that causes this paradigm shift in knowledge? How does the discontinuous rupture that breaks the dominant knowledge framework of an era occur? To answer these questions, this study uses the SECI model for the analysis of the knowledge-creating processes from the Renaissance and today.

The SECI model (the knowledge-creating model) developed by Ikujiro Nonaka, a Japanese business management scholar, is based on the theory of tacit or explicit knowledge, which was proposed by Michael Polanyi, a British scientist from Hungary, who studied how we fundamentally identify and understand the world [9] (Figure 2).

Polanyi stated that “we know more than we can tell” [9] and focused on the value of tacit knowledge, arguing that in addition to explicit knowledge, which can be crystallized and shared, there also exists tacit knowledge, which is already known; however, it is difficult to explain the way it becomes known in words or images. Nonaka accepted Polanyi’s theory, which states that knowledge expands through tacit knowledge, as an epistemological idea about how knowledge is created. Furthermore, from the perspective of a business scholar who values practical effectiveness, he created the SECI model by combining this idea of his with the ontological aspect, whereby knowledge does not merely remain in the epistemological dimension but is created through the interaction of the entities that create knowledge in real life [10]. This model was theorized in “The Knowledge-Creating Company” by Nonaka in 1995 (Figure 3).

The essence of his theory is that new knowledge is created when tacit knowledge, which Michael Polanyi grasped as a source of knowledge, is appropriately converted, accumulated, and amplified. Nonaka called the social interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge “knowledge conversion,” which was classified into four modes and explained [11].

① Socialization: This refers to an aspect of experiential knowledge based on the conversion from tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge. Socialization is a process of creating one’s tacit knowledge through someone else’s tacit knowledge while sharing experiences. In the past, such experiential knowledge was constrained by space and time due to the condition that experiences had to be shared. Typical examples include the transfer of knowledge in a teacher–student or master–apprentice relationship [12].

② Externalization: This refers to an aspect of conceptual knowledge based on the conversion from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. Externalization is a process of converting conscious tacit knowledge into the explicit knowledge of a crystallized concept in order to express it in a form that can be shared with others, such as in words and pictures. Typical examples include conceptualizing knowledge through words, pictures, videos, and programs [13,14].

③ Combination: This refers to an aspect of systemic knowledge based on the conversion from explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge. This is a process of creating new knowledge by reconstructing existing information via a method of combining and processing different types of explicit knowledge. Typical examples include the use of the Internet, large databases, and big data [13,14,15].

④ Internalization: This refers to an aspect of operational knowledge based on the conversion from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. Internalization means that the knowledge created through the above three processes is learned through practice [14] (p. 107). Typical examples include a type of knowledge that is often called know-how [13].

Through the SECI model, we examined the characteristics of the moments where knowledge conversion could occur due to the interactions of knowledge. Nonaka uses a “knowledge spiral” graph to explain the impact of the knowledge conversion process on society [16]. In the knowledge spiral graph, the epistemological level represented by tacit and explicit knowledge is on the vertical axis, and the ontological level of the entities that create it is on the horizontal axis. In the graph, the knowledge spiral appears when tacit knowledge springing from an individual is dynamically boosted while circulating the processes of S (socialization), E (externalization), C (combination), and I (internalization); through these interactions, it is gradually amplified and finally exceeds the ontological dimension, thereby forming a societal knowledge paradigm [10] (Figure 4).

The architectural profession must form a very close relationship with the knowledge of the present era in order to find the principles for constructing building information or to confirm the validity of the constructed information, as stated earlier. Therefore, this study will analyze the knowledge paradigms of the Renaissance and the present day through the SECI model in order to show the essence of the architectural profession.

3. Results

Professor Ian Goldin at the University of Oxford has argued that the Renaissance and the present era have many similarities in that they are periods of transition [1]. There are many commonalities that meaningfully bind the two periods together; however, this study focuses on the media revolution. The printing revolution and the digital revolution, respectively, enhanced the knowledge creation process innovatively by explicitly converting information that could not be socially shared before. Furthermore, printed materials and digital information, which are new explicit forms of knowledge that appeared in the two periods, respectively, overthrew the previous paradigm and stably established a new knowledge paradigm in their own way.

The analysis shows that the relationship that the architectural profession formed with knowledge before the Renaissance was experiential [17]; however, over the course of the Renaissance, the relationship changed gradually and became conceptual [18]. As such, the essence of the architectural profession that has continued to the present day involves constructing and expressing building information. On the other hand, with recent technological advancements, this trend has changed into one showing a systemic relationship. With the emergence of machines, which are new knowledge-processing agents that processes digital information, the newest architectural professionals seek to process knowledge through the use of algorithm-embedded machines rather than direct conceptualization [7].

The essence of the architectural profession in this relationship involves constructing building information that can be recognized by not only humans but also machines. In this changed environment, the ability to systematize and simulate building information through collaboration with machines will be more valuable than the ability to conceptualize building information in a way that stakeholders can understand. In Section 3.1 and Section 3.2, this result will be examined in more detail (

Table 1. The essence of the architectural profession by era.

Era	Knowledge Paradigm	Building Information	Architectural Profession
Renaissance	Conceptual	Human-readable	Expression
Today	Systemic	Machine-readable	Simulation

).

3.1. The Advent of a New Architectural Profession

Under the knowledge paradigm of the pre-Renaissance period, there was a strong experiential aspect in the relationship between building information and knowledge. Most of the architectural knowledge was tacit knowledge and belonged to individuals (master craftsmen) or groups (guilds), while building information was usually constructed empirically. At that time, the recording of knowledge was not yet common, and unrecorded knowledge was subject to the constraints of space and time [3]. Therefore, relevant knowledge could only be transmitted through apprenticeship training or field experience, and it could not leave fields where such knowledge and experiences were concentrated. Consequently, the distinction between the architectural profession and master craftsmen in these fields was vague, and the main agent of the profession was not clearly established. Thus, various agents, from officials with relevant experience to master craftsmen and clergy, were able to perform it [19].

Under the new knowledge paradigm of the Renaissance, the relationship between building information and knowledge changed tremendously, and a new architectural profession emerged [18]. First, Gutenberg’s printing revolution had led to an explosive increase in the possibility that tacit knowledge could become explicit knowledge, which could be shared in society through print media. This had revolutionarily enhanced the knowledge creation process throughout society and changed the knowledge paradigm. With this trend, architectural knowledge, which remained in the experiential dimension, was conceptualized through printed materials and shared with readers based on architectural theories. Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture (De re aedificatoria) were the representative books on architectural theories at that time, and in the process of being shared, these works were combined with other explicit knowledge, accumulating more knowledge (Figure 5).

Through the new explicit knowledge that increased socially, individuals were able to internalize more information, which gave birth to an architectural profession of knowledge-based intellectuals. The newly emerged architectural profession created new value based on the conceptualized knowledge theories, overwhelming the value of experience that the previous generation had. This is a plain example that shows the impact of a knowledge paradigm shift on the architectural profession, and an ability that is suitable for the paradigm within an era is recognized as having a higher value in society.

The newly emerged architectural profession under the conceptual paradigm was able to build higher expertise; this was done by conceptualizing not only the knowledge directly related to architecture, but also related to a variety of academic disciplines, such as geometry, engineering, mathematics, science, and arts, through printed materials, which appeared as new explicit knowledge. At that time, printed materials were the most important means used by the emerging class of intellectuals to express their concepts, and architects who sought to be included in this emerging class also used them actively. As other professionals used languages, symbols, and images to convey their concepts through printed materials, architects sought to express complex building information more accurately—even by comprehensively combining all of these mediums.

As the name “Renaissance” suggests, the social atmosphere for Greek and Roman knowledge had also affected the architectural profession of that period, and the rediscovery of the classical linear perspective technique by Filippo Brunelleschi has continued and led to the advanced drawing technique in the present era. As the learning of knowledge through print media and representation skills were valued more than on-site architectural skills and experiences, the architectural profession was separated from the work site [3,20]. This gave birth to the prototype of today’s architectural profession, which vicariously implements the conceptually constructed building information through master craftsmen [21].

Today, we are confronted with the emergence of a new architectural profession, which is distinguished from the traditional architectural profession that has continued, to date, as a class of intellectuals. The digital revolution has enabled the more direct delivery of various types of information, which had to be expressed by humans before, through digital media. Furthermore, it has become much easier to connect information by converting information in a common format called a digital signal. This trend has revolutionarily enhanced today’s knowledge creation process, causing a change in the knowledge paradigm. This trend has recently been accelerated by the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which advanced under the banners of hyper-connectivity and hyper-convergence.

Today, the relationship between building information and knowledge shows a trend of becoming combined and systematized. Previously, knowledge processing was limited to humans only, representing a limitation in handling information. However, as machines have emerged as new agents of knowledge processing, they have sharply improved the capability for integrating and processing information, resulting in knowledge creation on a scale that is incomparable to anything before [22,23].

As a result, a trend has emerged whereby the building of information leading to a new type of knowledge is also combined by machines that can learn from experiences and process theories [24]. In this society of knowledge creation, the ability to systematically handle information combined through machines is more important than learning concepts, and accordingly a new architectural profession is emerging—distinguished from the architectural profession of intellectuals (Figure 6).

3.2. The Role of the New Architectural Profession

This section focuses on how the new architectural profession covered earlier differs from the existing one passed down from the Renaissance. Machines today are emerging as new knowledge-processing entities, creating an entirely new knowledge creation process. This new knowledge paradigm calls for additional cooperation with machines beyond that with humans, creating a trend whereby building information changes from being human-readable to machine-readable [5]. Therefore, developing machine-readable building information is the central role of the new architectural profession.

BIM emerged in response to this trend. Professor Chuck Eastman, known as the father of BIM, defines it as “the electronic representation of facilities” [25,26]. He states that “All of this initially became possible when building information began to be stored in an electronic representation that machines could understand” [26].

Eastman’s ideas are supported by various groups. The American Institute of Architects and the National Building Information Modeling Standard define BIM as a digital representation of a facility. Further, the British Standards Institution and the South Korea Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport use “digital modeling” and “digital transformation” as keywords [27,28,29,30].

As such, the integral digitization of building information is the BIM’s fundamental function. This makes it possible to visualize the geometry of a building, detect interferences, control schedules, and calculate quantities. The BIM workflow is implemented and enlarged through computerization in a way that expands the dimensions of facility-related information in digital and virtual worlds. The real-world application of BIM using this method is called nD (n-Dimension).

Furthermore, nD is used to integrate knowledge management systems to process and share information throughout a building’s life cycle [31]. Here, the term “dimension” is used metaphorically to express BIM’s information processing power, not as a subject of strict scientific argument [32]. Generally, levels up to 4D refer to work based on virtual worlds in which the concept of time (4D) is added to a 3D space, while 5D or higher indicates various expendabilities following the users’ interpretation rather than the officially established definition. According to a related study, most people using such terminology consider 5D as meaning price information, 86% consider 6D to mean sustainability, and 85% consider 7D to mean facility management [33]. Extended dimensions such as 6D and 7D can be used to strengthen project management, operations, and sustainable design process tied to building maintenance [34].

This extension of nD has two significant implications. First, the existing 1D to 3D concepts were limited in conveying building information, while BIM enables expansion beyond such limitations. Hence, the role of the new architectural profession is to integrate all design information required for the management of a facility’s entire life cycle using multidimensional (nD) BIM [33,35] (Figure 7).

4. Discussion

What kind of purpose should the new architectural profession have in order to perform its role? Mankind has been constantly expanding its boundaries by pushing its limits. In this sense, the industrial revolutions that have directly led to today’s changes can be understood as a series of periods in which mankind revolutionarily overcame human limitations through technological advancements. The First Industrial Revolution of the 18th century aimed to overcome the physical limitations of humans through steam-engine-based machines [36], while the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century accelerated this process through electric-energy-based mass production [37].

Later, the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions in the late 20th century and the early 21st century, respectively, showed more evolved forms in that humans challenged the cognitive limitations beyond the physical limitations. The digital revolution—the Third Industrial Revolution—revolutionarily increased the amount of information that humans could handle with the aid of computers and the Internet [38]. Finally, the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution aims to create an intelligent world that connects and fuses vast amounts of knowledge in order to use it transcendentally [22,39] (Figure 8). This intelligent world can be implemented based on technologies, such as big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, and all contents from the real world are connected to the digital twins, and their simulation results are reflected in the real world [40]. This allows humans to assess and predict the real world while overcoming the limits of their intelligence.

By examining the goals of the industrial and technological advancements, we can understand the essence of the trend in which building information handled by the architectural professional changes from human-readable to machine-readable, which enables simulation.

As mentioned before, the essence of this trend, in which building information is changed into machine-readable forms that can be simulated based on the industrial and technological advancement, is the manifestation of an attempt to overcome human cognitive limitations. The goal is to use the complementary strengths of human intelligence and machine intelligence to achieve better performance compared to the performance when they are used separately [41,42]. Human intelligence is capable of broad thinking, but its information processing speed is relatively slower, the accuracy of computational operations is lower compared to machines, and there are limits to remembering information [43,44]. Because of these characteristics, the building of information had faced many problems before. The building information constructed by humans has an inherent quantitative knowledge limitation that must be considered and poses a time-consumption problem, as well as the possibility of having many errors in terms of knowledge processing.

On the other hand, although machines cannot think as voluntarily and broadly as humans do, they have very fast processing speeds, high accuracy, and a vast storage capability that seems to be almost limitless [43]. These characteristics of machines are expected to supplement the cognitive limitations of humans, allowing them to respond to the many problems posed by conventional building information. The proper use of machine intelligence not only dramatically increases the amount of knowledge that can be used as building information but also helps to process information faster with high accuracy. Based on this, we can conclude that the architectural profession will be able to verify building information based on data beyond the sensuous assessments of humans.

After all, the history of the architectural profession encompasses the relationship with buildings that have not been built yet. If the history of the architectural profession before the Renaissance was about directly implementing buildings that had not been built yet, its history after the Renaissance is about expressing unbuilt buildings. In this long history, because it was difficult to perfectly construct and deliver buildings that had not been built yet, they had to be implemented directly or expressed in the way they could be implemented. However, since BIM enables the creation of digital twins, the previous generation of the profession, which aimed to express unbuilt buildings as much as possible, will come to an end [45]. The role of the newly emerging architectural profession will involve simulating an unbuilt building in a variety of ways through collaboration with machines and reflecting the results to increase the building’s performance dramatically [40,45].

5. Conclusions

As practitioners, we question the unexpected delay in the implementation of BIM in Korea. The first public BIM project in Korea was conducted in 2008 [46]. Although over a decade has passed since then, BIM is still not used as a routinary design method, and there are growing concerns that BIM might eventually fail due to the various practical obstacles that need to be overcome [47]. There have been several discussions on what may have caused this delay, but we focus on the conventional practicing architects’ resistance to new methods such as BIM. Therefore, for this new method to truly become a routinary tool for next-generation architects, it is crucial to understand its essential nature.

This study was conducted to correct the basic misunderstandings encountered by architects who are familiar with the traditional architectural profession and working on the front line in fields when they face the new architectural profession using BIM.

This misunderstanding is about redundant tasks, and people tend to avoid talking about this misunderstanding in official situations, but architects familiar with the traditional work may have questions about it while performing the role of the new architectural professional. Do I really need to enter the information I already know? Do I have to do BIM for making architectural drawings? Is BIM inevitable for making architectural drawings?

BIM is a building information construction technique for modeling that involves the inputting of attributes for each object [35], and sometimes it may feel inconvenient to input, one-by-one, the attributes that can be sufficiently found out based on the context. Furthermore, the drawing process generally occurs after the model has been constructed with BIM; hence, traditional architects, who have for a long time created architectural drawings without any 3D models or used only rough 3D models, may feel that the BIM work itself is unnecessary. This thinking arises in the expert group who have not accepted the paradigm shift.

As discussed earlier, in the traditional paradigm, building information is to be expressed after constructing it through the conceptualization of knowledge, and these processes occur among human experts. In this setting, human-readable building information could be omitted or delivered in the form of a summary according to the customary practice, relying on the characteristics of humans who think broadly and comprehensively, albeit with low accuracy, about computational operations. In this paradigm, since inevitable defects are assumed, experts who can handle them skillfully have held a very high status.

In such cases, the building information constructed by the experts in the traditional method is very difficult to be verified before it is built, and this is because the people who have constructed the information have the most knowledge of it in the project, meaning many questions beyond the expert’s knowledge are not raised. Thus far, no one has been able to guarantee that a building receives an optimal amount of solar radiation by considering the heating and cooling rates according to the use of the building. Furthermore, questions about the optimal solar radiation rate, such as a question on how well future climate changes can be predicted within a scenario, have not been discussed because they are considered to be within an unsurmountable domain.

However, it may be possible to overcome such limitations under the new paradigm because assessments and predictions can be performed by a machine containing a huge amount of knowledge that cannot be handled by a single expert. To realize this, the constructed building information must be machine-readable, which additionally requires a separate method from human understanding. This can be understood as unnecessary and redundant work, but it should be understood as a process of the new profession for constructing building information beyond the limitations of human thinking. Under the new paradigm, it is more important to construct building information that can overcome the existing limitations through cooperation with machines than to attempt the conceptualization on one’s own.

Many studies have compared humans and machines in competing situations and discussed which is superior. Further, as Dellermann pointed out, these discussions are mostly based on the implicit hope that someday machines will replace humans in completing complex tasks. However, there is still a long way to go to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is capable of understanding and learning all intelligent tasks that humans can perform [41]. The problem with this kind of expectation is that it naturally shifts the focus of the discussion to a binary structure that pits humans against machines. However, humans and machines can complement each other in completely different ways. Therefore, in recent times, an increasing number of studies are examining the hybrid intelligence [48]. In this period of transition, BIM is the first step, wherein the old methods of handling building information are combined with the new agents (machines) of knowledge processing.

Therefore, making building information machine-readable is not just a preparation task for simulations and is not a redundant task (but it also tells us that BIM that does not consider any simulations, or the use of information is unnecessary). As revealed in this study, the architectural profession is greatly affected by the knowledge paradigm of the current era, and the ability to conform to the paradigm of the era is considered more valuable. Let us recall once again a group of architects who, as intellectuals, emerged in the Renaissance period by distinguishing themselves from the group of craftsmen who adhered to the previous knowledge paradigm.

Today, we are living in an era of revolution that surpasses the Renaissance. This period has been named the Fourth Industrial Revolution during its ongoing process—unlike all other technological revolutions, which were named through evaluations by later generations. It embodies the expectation of mankind for intelligent technology, which will advance through connections and fusions of enormous digital information. One must ask again what today’s knowledge paradigm is, and what the role of the architectural profession that conforms to it is. We hope that this study will help people understand the essential nature of the new architectural profession.