Millions of repetitive clicks leading inevitably to carpal tunnel. Millions of taps on the spacebar to repeat a command. Left click execute, repeat until what is in my head is on the screen. Initially, in your early 20s your mind needs the time to think through the order of operations to draw a building. Mid-20s, after a few thousand hours of mind-numbing arrays, fillets, copy-rotate, mirror, and offsets, my brain is successfully faster than my hands.
I'll never forget my first site plan at my first job in 2015. A variation of it is on the corner of Main and Jamboree in Irvine, California. My boss at the time laid out some flair tip pen lines on trace paper. His 25 years of experience in solving site plans clearly on display: in eight strokes, here's half the building mass. Four more, there's the parking garage. Eight more, an open courtyard. Liner units here. Weird condition on the back. Pool goes here, elevators there. He didn't need a scale. Didn't need a computer. He handed me the trace paper, and I left on my merry way to validate his assumptions.
That first "validate his assumptions" assignment took me two weeks to do, granted it was my first time doing it. I thought to myself, never again will this take me two weeks. I built dynamic blocks with labels for my units. That eliminated annotations, kept my tabulations accurate, but at the end of two years of refining the process, I couldn't get my time below one work day to do a site plan, 3D massing model and tabulation. The final workflow I landed on before working on TestFit full time? Excel. Just model the whole thing in Excel first (to scale — 1 pixel = 1 foot). Then draw the plan to match. Commodity buildings are math problems inside a spatial container.
I became John Henry from folklore: the hammer strikes the same spot with the force of a locomotive, defeating the steam shovel. For one project in Arizona I did nearly 20 different iterations to solve the deal, and that project is built today. Iterations matter. Coordinated iterations with the finance and construction team mattered significantly more.
Ideas to get others to solve site plans like math problems fell on deaf ears. Excel isn't a design tool, they said. Just use trace, it's faster. (It isn't.)
This early in my career, I was already contemplating what it would take to unseat my ability to draw site plans — what would be a better solution to all of these clicks, all of this noise, on 95% of my work that would simply be thrown out. The idea to build a better machine isn't new. The idea to solve a quality site plan in less than 30 milliseconds, while providing all of the math, so I can focus on building massing? That's new.
The Impetus To Write This Down
On April 2 this year, I sat down and decided to draw a site plan the traditional way, the way that most designers draw site plans: AutoCAD. But that wouldn't be very scientific. I invited guests to join to simulate a typical office environment, but to add pressure, we livestreamed it.
For those of us in the soft-skilled AEC community we spend thousands of hours on {click, spacebar, rotate, array, mirror, array, select all, copy, rotate} to get our work done. The machine wins on repetition. The human wins on intent.