Mike JeonMay 1st, 2020
Whaaaaaat? A blog by Mike Jeon? Yes, it’s true. I’m not much of a blogger but this quarantine situation has people doing unexpected things. Going about our daily lives confined at home, working remotely, dining in every morning…noon…and night, and actually using the “phone” part of our smartphones to talk to people. As they say, we’re all adjusting to this new abnormal.
Stuck at home, I found myself with more free time than I knew what to do with. Lying on my sofa with a case of boredom, I realized that all this extra time was an opportunity to do something that I never made time to do in the past. For years, I’ve been putting off a complete renovation of my condo. Of course, that’s not an easy thing to do. Other than some ideas in my head, and worrying about logistics (like…where will I live while it’s being renovated?), I hadn’t taken any big steps to move it forward. And I really wanted to model my design intent in Revit. But I kept putting it off. Until now.
I took out my trusty tape measure that I’ve had since waaaaay back when I was an intern architect doing field surveys and started to lay out my existing home in the just released Revit 2021. I’ve been working on this model for about a week now, figuring out design details, generating images in Autodesk Cloud Rendering, trying out different color and material combinations. And while I provide training and consulting in Revit to our customers as one of CADD’s application specialists, I hadn’t realized just how remarkable Revit has become until I started working on my own project.
This experience took me back to my years at the University of Virginia, School of Architecture, where I created animations in the 1st release of 3D Studio on MS-DOS, running on “state of the art” computers with 100MHz Intel Pentium chips. I took so long to process animations back then that I had to wake up from my studio desk early in the morning to run down to the computer lab to save my work before a class started and shut down any running programs. Fun times.
Somehow through this unusual and trying time in our lives, I rediscovered something that I forgot about, a feeling that I had when I first wanted to become an architect growing up. The process of designing things and turning them into reality is enjoyable and satisfying. I’m sure many of you in the AEC industry share that same feeling.
One day, hopefully soon, my condo will get renovated. And I will look back at this moment when the world turned upside down, but I got inspired to look ahead to the future.