Freeing architects from proprietary software

A pair of talks at Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 addressed ongoing work in a niche market within the broader "design" umbrella: architecture. Yorick van Havre discussed the difficulties of running an architecture business based on free software, and Mark Meagher presented a new free-software application for architects.

FreeCAD for architects

Van Havre is a Belgian architect living and working in São Paulo, Brazil. He is also a core developer of FreeCAD, one of the most popular open-source computer-aided-design (CAD) tools—although he pointed out that "core" sounds a bit too lofty, since the FreeCAD team is a rather informal collection of developers. He uses FreeCAD for his design work, as one would expect, along with some other free-software applications. But the process that architects use to design buildings and manage projects is changing—in ways that pose real challenges for the free-software community.

Years ago, architects used to start by making drawings, he said, then move to 2D CAD designs, then to 3D models. Now they do the drawing step directly in CAD software. But, increasingly, architects are doing the entire design process in a single application. That change is due to the rise of building information modeling (BIM). While BIM software handles 3D modeling, it also incorporates a vast amount of metadata about materials, expenses, environmental concerns, and other topics. That allows the architect to update the model and have all of the pertinent metadata changes seamlessly updated at the same time. Thus, the metadata can be extracted or exported to keep track of costs in an accounting tool, file plans for approval, or analyze changes.

As one can probably guess, the BIM software market is dominated by proprietary vendors. Two companies—Autodesk and Nemetschek—control "virtually 100% of the market," Van Havre said, and charge $5000 a seat, annually, for software licenses. Those proprietary applications are "all in one" solutions, and their file formats change every year—typical vendor lock-in moves. But the monopolization of the market harms consumers, too, he said. Since the buildings designed in these proprietary applications are all configured the same way, they all end up looking the same when they are completed, which benefits no one. Several countries have started to move toward making BIM mandatory, which puts free-software architects in a bind.

The good news, however, is that there is now a path forward, thanks to the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) specification. IFC is an open and human-readable file format and it is maintained by a non-profit consortium. The FreeCAD team has added IFC support to its architecture module, even supporting several "dialects" commonly found in the wild. It can import 3D meshes from Blender and convert them to BIM models, and it can extract and export metadata to spreadsheets.

FreeCAD's architecture module still needs more work, including additional primitives for functional building elements like doors, beams, and windows. It also needs "direct editing" support, in which the user can change a model by, say, simply "pushing" a wall to a different spot on screen. And it lacks support for doing structural analysis. But adding IFC support has enabled FreeCAD to implement some creative new features as well. For example, it can generate "IKEA-like instructions" for assembling parts, which is not something he thinks architects would have thought of.

There are other challenges also facing the free-software architecture community, he said. The most pressing is the lack of viable 2D CAD software. Despite the prevalence of 3D, many architects still like to start work in 2D, and there is no free-software application that can handle the "gigantic drawings" that architects use.

Van Havre noted that people often ask why he does not use Blender for his 3D work. In fact, he does use it at the office, he said, but not for precision work. Blender is great for "creative side" design, and for rendering realistic images, but real projects need the precision of FreeCAD. "When we need something to be 20 millimeters, it can't be 21 millimeters," he explained.

topoBIM

The second architecture talk was Mark Meagher's introduction to topoBIM, which he called a "moderately subversive" project to undermine the proprietary BIM-software vendors' hold on architects. In essence, topoBIM is a small application that fills in a gap not served by the proprietary applications discussed by Van Havre. The goal of the developers, Meagher said, is to find several such gaps and be the first to provide solutions; that lessens the appeal of the proprietary software suites.

Architecture projects have to regularly transform data from one format to another for different users, Meagher said. There are a lot of disciplines involved in planning and putting up a building, and a lot of the training in architecture school deals with understanding the links between the different representations of a building: the design, the structural and safety analysis, the materials engineering, the environmental analysis, and so forth.

BIM helps by managing a lot of those models, but one that it does not address is a building's "topology." This topology, however, is not its physical connectedness, but its functional design. Frequently, he said, buildings have to be designed to optimize traffic flow or to keep certain elements either connected or separated.

Perhaps the best example, he said, is a hospital. There is a security topology: unauthorized people should not be able to walk into certain parts of the building, while authorized people need to frequently make certain trips. Similarly, there is a "clean room" topology for some areas, wherein particular rooms need to be connected in order to prevent contamination. And there are many functional paths to optimize: getting from patient rooms to labs, for instance, without traffic jams and (hopefully) with a minimum of travel time.

The right way to model these requirements is in a topological model; topoBIM is a software tool that lets the user create and manage such a model, while tracking all of the associated BIM metadata. The tool is still in the early stage of development—it does not yet seem to have an online presence (apart from a rather old version on GitHub), for example—but Meagher believes it is the right path forward for open source. There are several other places where "bespoke software" written by the open-source community can free architects from the constraints of the proprietary software vendors.

At the end of the talk, Meagher was joined by fellow architect Phil Langley, who has been working on topoBIM. There were a number of questions from the audience, most dealing with how building topology fits into the architectural project workflow. It is, evidently, an early stage in the planning process, as Meagher and Langley explained. But it is important, because it helps capture the requirements of a building's owners, inhabitants, and other stakeholders.

Hopefully, we will see more information soon about topoBIM and other architectural software projects. In the meantime, Van Havre and the rest of the FreeCAD team will, no doubt, continue to expand the scope of that application's architecture support. It may be an uphill battle to compete with entrenched proprietary-software vendors, but that does not seem to have dampened the spirits of the project teams.

[The author would like to thank Libre Graphics Meeting for travel assistance to London for LGM 2016.]