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Archive for March 12th, 2008

My brother spent a couple of hours chatting with me last night. He was really upset and, unfortunately, it seemed that whatever I said to him actually made him feel worse. Oops! See my baby brother (he’s ten years younger than me) is an Architecture student in Mexico city. He’ll graduate this year. For several weeks, all he could talk about was this contest he was participating in.  Several students from other schools all over the city were also in it. The students had to come up with a design for a new museum about water, “Museo del Agua”, and it had to be creative, functional and harmoniously integrate the elements of the environment, in particular, a small water body that is located in the area where the museum would be. According to what he told me, the design that wins first place will actually be built in Xochimilco, Mexico city. What an honor for a student, don’t you think? Of course, my brother would’ve loved to be that student! But not all wishes come true… At least, not all the time.

For several weeks, he kept emailing me AutoCAD files and jpegs, showing me his progress. His ideas were really good, and I’m not saying this just because he’s my baby brother. He worked the pre-Hispanic  Mexico theme, with narrow canals connecting the galleries, water everywhere, surrounding the whole of the museum, and a snake shaped main corridor. There were also chinampas, small rectangular-shaped areas of fertile land built on top of shallow water, that were used by the ancient Aztecs to grow crops in the lake beds of the Valley of Mexico. The artistic concept included figures of pre-Hispanic deities, like Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, carved in stone, as well as statues similar to those in the original buildings made by our ancestors. For several weeks, I kept telling him he should find a way to “translate” his ideas into 3D, but instead, he kept working in AutoCAD, created a few isometric views, and made a scale model.

On the day the projects were presented, he was shocked and mortified to find that most students from other universities were presenting computer generated 3D models with killer rendering jobs. The judges were delighted with the work of these students, even when some of the projects lacked creativity or functionality, simply because the 3D models allowed them to visualize their ideas in a way that no 2D drawing or even a scale model could do. My brother was not happy. I think I don’t really need to tell you who won the contest. No, it wasn’t my brother. Although he did get something out of this particularly painful experience: he learned that this is a 3D world now  and he has to go with the flow.  I would tell him to try SolidWorks, although I’m not sure if it’s used in Architecture at all. Is it?  For now, he said he would try something called REVIT, from Autodesk.  I hope he has better luck next time!