BIM has made a handful of global companies very rich while the rest of the industry pays to stand still.

 

Somehow, it’s all called progress.

Member of a small consultancy or a tier-one contractor, we pay through the nose simply to communicate within our own industry.

It’s like jumping on the statin train straight out of school and blindly accepting ever-higher doses—all in the name of ‘living longer’ or simply participating.

We once joked that we’d pay for air. Now we pay to use the industry’s ‘language’.

A simple example as a reference from a different field: my husband, in his late 70s, recently tried to join two organisations that communicated only through phone apps. He dropped both activities, despite loving singing and paddling.

We could have stepped in, but once direct communication disappeared, so did his interest.

Access to communication in Construction is also narrowing. The tools grow smarter while participants quietly drop away—and not only older ones. People in their 40s and 30s face the same barriers. They all need intermediaries to access data essential to their business activities.

 “Move to BIM or be left behind” sounds less like progress more an ultimatum.

If you want to work, you must BUY the tools that claim to enable AEC communication.

Don’t mistake this for a shared language serving a better industry. The vendors need projects on their systems, whether those systems serve one user or a thousand. Usability, satisfaction, and broad BIM literacy come second to the business model.

So does quality communication.

Few people are more committed to BIM than I am. I still love the unfashionable acronym and believe in its potential. For some 40 years, I’ve bought licences, upgraded hardware, and kept learning.

If that doesn’t excite us, there’s AI and robotics. Stay excited or scared—but keep paying.

Question mediocre tools and rising subscriptions, and another monster appears to stop us reaching for pen and tracing paper.

Lately, that monster is AI, supposedly ready to make our hard-won software fluency obsolete. I’m curious, but not especially scared; age and experience help.

AI can translate English into my obscure native languages remarkably well, but there’s little evidence it can assemble building-specific connection details.

Decades of poor global documentation give machine learning a harder problem than European grammar.

Sometimes I imagine a ‘tradwife’ movement in modelling: companies abandoning technology to draw beautiful buildings directly onto tracing paper. I’m joking. Half a century later, I still remember the devastation of one wrongly inked line.

Progress and technology are good. But BIM’s ‘mother tongue’—Revit, Archicad, and the rest—is poor by today’s standards. Average games offer better models, textures, interfaces, and speed. SimCity had stronger building blocks for a common AEC language 20 years ago.

I’m told Europe is better. Hard to imagine. Archicad, once beloved, has done little lately to justify its survival. Revit remains slow and clunky while its price rises. Revizto was a welcome change: rebuilt on a gaming engine, it let many people work on one project and lowered the barrier to accessing data. I only wish it had pushed more boldly towards affordable communication for everyone.

 With age, you learn to accept a status quo that still works—sort of.

But the enthusiast in me still searches for the spark beyond the daily slog: the satisfaction of a job well done.

This miniseries will explore smaller topics, mostly around shop drawings.

I’ve worked with them for years and see the process as an outdated burden in need of reform—though my proposed fixes rarely land well.

Let this old blog hold my thoughts on how we might do shop drawings better.

 

Come back again, check it out.