The Sawtooth Chart Was Never the Enemy
đź“° The sawtooth was never the enemy. Phil Read makes the case that the jagged stopping points everyone spent twenty years trying to smooth away were where judgment got applied, and asks what replaces them now.
What happens to professional judgment when the work that used to build it now takes nine seconds?
Summary
Phil Read came back on the show (TRXL 237) for what's turning into an annual conversation. He's the co-founder and CEO of Read | Thomas, he was around Revit in its earliest days, and he spends most of the year sitting with firms in the States and Australia. That exposure is one the reasons I keep asking him back. He sees what firms are doing with BIM, visualization, and AI, all which bear little resemblance to what gets posted on LinkedIn about them.
He opened by rehabilitating a diagram most of us were taught to treat as a failure. The sawtooth, the jagged line in the MacLeamy curve that BIM was supposed to smooth into something continuous, is in Phil's reading the most valuable part of the process. The jagged bits are where somebody with experience stops and says wait a minute.
From there we got into what AI is genuinely good at right now, which turns out to be visual: materials and lighting studies rather than generating building form. We got into why automated documentation is fast but not yet trustworthy. And we spent a good stretch on if delegation is the skill that AI demands, and nobody teaches architects to delegate until roughly year twenty, what exactly are we preparing people for?
What's Inside
- The sawtooth chart, reconsidered. The industry spent twenty years trying to eliminate the bumps in a diagram, and Phil argues we misread what the bumps were.
- Done versus finished. A hospital project with 2,000 patient rooms shows exactly where documentation automation currently stops being useful.
- The silicon intern. Phil's framing for what AI is in a studio, and why the analogy holds further than it first appears.
- Delegation as a first-year skill. Architecture school teaches you to do everything yourself, which raises an awkward question about what happens next.
- Where the time goes. When a week of work compresses into a morning, somebody decides what fills the rest, and the default answer is not a good one.
- An event built around the same idea. Phil runs AEC Acoustics every fall in North Florida, deliberately small and deliberately slower.
