Material taxonomy is a big loose end in our standard template. Sigh.
We have thought about the material-organization problem quite a lot, and our thinking has boiled down the problem to the choice between two taxonomic schemes, as follows.
The first organizes materials according to CSI index number:
06 | pine vertical
07 | epdm membrane
09 | paint – gray
09 | paint – slightly lighter gray
This is indeed the scheme you will most likely find in your project. This is also the scheme, basically, used by Benjamin-Moore to identify each and every color in the swatch book. Acknowledging that a well-selected subset can be incredibly useful, we know that a catalog of the spectrum will never enough, and never complete.
The second approach organizes materials according to application within the architecture of the project.
01 | the material the exterior walls are
02 | the material the interior walls are
03 | the material the interior door panels are
04 | the material the interior door casing is
05 | the material the roof is
The big disadvantage of this approach is – let’s be honest: we haven’t thought it through yet. We don’t have a working indexing scheme (note to the future: CSI Uniformat would be a good place to start.) Neither do we have any projects working fully in this mode.
But it does offer some intriguing advantages:
- Material assignment tweaks are easier in the Rendering-in-Artlantis phase of the work.
- Models would start with a smaller set of materials.
- The way we build in this office for our clients in our part of the world would be coded in the DNA of our project templates.
- Materials would key to our aesthetic proclivities from the get-go. “Wood floor”, “stone wall”, “concrete wall”, “timber beam”, “footing concrete” would all be the types we already find acceptable, rejecting the considerable dreck in the current material list.
Finally, it allows you to follow Eric Bobrow’s advice in the tutorial at the head of this post, where he shows you how to change the color or texture of an entire class of elements throughout a structure with a mouse click or two.
Come to think of it, this way of thinking about materials is nicely analogous to the Project Map/View Map distinction we’ve been discussing of late. Views are “dress codes” for the locations of the Project Map. Materials are “dress codes” for the anatomical components of the building structure. The Project Map is a list of “Locations without Character” and View Settings bring character to these locations. A Material Assignment brings visual and tactile “character” to an architectural component in space. Both constructs are just another example of the useful distinction between Syntax and Semantics.
The Achilles Heel: effective designers using ArchiCAD still need to quickly re-define material attributes. Which in effect gets us back to the need for a digital equivalent of the Ben-Moore swatch book. In this case the swatches would be a catalog of beautiful seamless texture maps, spanning the entire spectrum of all building materials. And Oh Dear. We would want to do that for both ArchiCAD “materials” and Artlantis “shaders” or any other software we choose to use in the future.
So there is work to be done, but we have buildings to design. In the meantime, I think you’ll find Eric’s tutorial a useful introduction to the issue.