ABSTRACT
The architectural profession has steadily digitised since the mainstream introduction of computer-aided drafting in the 1980s. As one enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, machine intelligence and big data (the assembly of enormous collections of digital information), enabled by enormous processing and storage capacity brought by the commercialisation of cloud computing machines, is powering everything from mobile phones to self-driving cars: a second machine age. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is both an enormous source of digital data for design and a much-needed epistemological frame for computational reasoning and prediction about the building enterprise. Big data sets are growing in other aspects of building as well. Construction management is largely digital these days, with both BIM and transactional data generated as a building comes together; laser scanning of construction progress is an accessible, three-dimensional record of the work on the ground.
