Shane Burger is the Principal and Global Leader of Technical Innovation at Woods Bagot. He has pioneered the use of design computation methodologies in the AEC industry since the early 2000s, with a focus on the integration of computational processes in the design of arts and cultural institutions at Grimshaw Architects. Burger served as a director for eight years at Smartgeometry, promoting advanced computational methods and digital craftsmanship. His expertise includes BIM, digital fabrication, building performance, and the application of VR/AR and smart building technologies.
What inspired you to become an architect?
Following early play in the visual arts as a kid, I started to become interested in design and architecture as a teenager after my mother worked as a landscape designer, and subsequently in marketing at an architecture firm. I would play with her drafting board and visit the firm she worked at. I became fascinated that a series of drawings and computer models could generate spaces that people inhabited – ideas becoming drawings and models, creating an impactful experience for people. In middle school, I would build models of spaces with cardboard, picturing how it would feel to move through them, and later I started to play with 3D modeling software.
As an early advocate of design computation methodologies, how have you seen this influence both your projects and the broader architecture field?
It changed my entire way of thinking about geometry and space, how one explores the iterative design process, and revealed the multitude of ways to deliver and implement a design. I started to see geometry as a more dynamic series of relationships between elements and experiences as you move about a building. It provided a performative answer to “why” a design was the way it was (environmental performance, spatial performance, material, and structural efficiency, etc). It also gave me ways to execute a design by bringing forward material opportunities and constraints into the early design process. It integrated my design approach and my thinking.
As for how it affects the broader architecture field, my involvement in the Smartgeometry organization as a Director meant I could directly influence how the broader profession absorbed computational methods. Helping push the democratization of computation meant these capabilities could be in the hands of a larger community of designers, increasing the engagement beyond practices and further into academia and industry. Students were coming out of school with both technical skills and new emergent design thinking processes. Practices were infusing performative design more widely into their work. The relationship between industry and practice was strengthened by giving them a common language (computation) to connect design and making.
Can you discuss a project where digital fabrication was pivotal, and how it changed the approach from design to construction?
There have been a series of digital fabrication projects that have changed our approach from design to construction. The topic first opened up for us at Woods Bagot through SAHMRI, the Southern Australia Health and Medical Research Institute, which was a collaboration between our New York, Adelaide, and Melbourne studios. That project helped us progress a multi-studio approach exploring complex geometry, performance, and collaborative communication methods with local and international fabricators.
It followed with Wynyard Walk in Sydney, a collaboration between New York and Sydney, where the geometry of the wall panels was informed by knowledge of downstream material casting and fabrication methods. In addition, the layout of thousands of unique wall and ceiling panels was scripted and ultimately communicated using computation techniques.
We’ve since carried this new approach into several projects across our global studio such as The Londoner, a high-end hotel with tessellated blue-glazed terracotta panels.
How do BIM and computational modeling transform project planning and execution today compared to the early 2000s?
Early 2000’s use of BIM and computation was almost adjacent to the core design process. BIM was mostly a mechanism for automating drawing production, and computation was used for more limited bespoke parts of the design. The use of both, now mainstream, is integrated into the design process, influencing how we think about design, delivery, collaboration, and making from inception to occupation. We design our delivery workflow cognizant of the affordances provided by integrating BIM and computation.
How do you maintain a balance between creative architectural design and the technical demands of modern building technologies?
I do not see creativity in architectural design in conflict with demanding building technologies. Creativity emerges from constraint. A truly creative solution must be cognizant of the building technologies used to realize it. To ignore the materials, building systems, and methods of construction afforded to you, is to suffer from the disconnect between design and craft. We should “model” these technical demands into our design process – represent materials limitations, fabrication opportunities and constraints, and assembly methods in the model itself to be the kit that makes up your design space.
How are advancements in building and spatial performance analysis shaping the way users interact with the spaces you create, particularly in the context of Smart Buildings?
An understanding of both building and spatial performance is a recognition that the buildings and spaces we inhabit are dynamic. They change over time due to the environment and how they are used. We use both off-the-shelf and custom-created analysis tools to understand those dynamics, informing our design decisions along the way to help enable the experiential potential of a space.
Smart Buildings, and the data they generate, can help us develop personas for the people who inhabit these spaces to use in analysis. We can then run simulations on movement and experiences for each design iteration.
Further, I would hope the “smart buildings” of the future will actively use this data to run their simulations. Instead of facilities management systems just focusing on building performance (energy, temperature/humidity), I hope that an “experience management system” would take into account occupant experience and social performance as its highest priority.
In projects with significant technological components, how do Agile project management techniques play a role?
Creative collaboration requires strong communication. The design process requires a recognition that while you may have a clear vision, the path to get there will wander and perhaps pivot, necessitating a certain lightness to the approach. Agile project management recognizes this uncertainty in path while remaining centered on the primacy of communication and transparency. Our digital tools aren’t there just to execute on complex design ideas, but to also facilitate complexity in the design and collaboration process itself.
What is your favorite architectural detail?
Anything by Scarpa. His ability to intersect materials expressively is unmatched.
Do you have a favorite material?
The brutalist in me loves concrete. I love its plasticity in its ability to take on any form, its ability to dramatically express shadows and light through solid and void, and its richness in surface and composition with the many aggregates and finishes. But at the same time, the humanist always appreciates well-executed wood used as structure or skin.
What advice would you give to aspiring architects eager to incorporate advanced technologies into their design processes?
Understand technology beyond just “picks and clicks”. Understand how it affects your thinking, both in how it may constrain you and also in how it opens up new design thinking approaches.
Hack it, break it, make it do things it wasn’t intended to do. The software you are handed is only the starting point.
And learn to make your tools. Learning scripting/programming isn’t an end in and of itself but is a means to be in more control of the benefits of constraints and opportunities in design.
A certain level of intimacy with your tools as an extension of your cognitive and creative abilities will allow truly new possibilities to emerge.
What are some of the most inspiring trends or movements you see emerging in architecture due to technological advancements?
I’ve become fascinated with the possibilities of augmented reality, not in how we use it to visualize building designs with VR headsets but instead in how small parts of it have infused their way into our daily lives. Our lives as humans are constantly mediated and augmented by the technologies we have on us every day – phones, digital watches, smart buildings, and IoT devices. Our physical world is also rich with data about our buildings, spaces, and both the histories and present experiences of the people in them. I believe there is a real latent opportunity for architects to understand how to realize our human experience in this digital/physical hybrid reality.
