I’m not at all in line with your point of view @Schnegg
I sketch in 2D and iterate on the ideas fast on paper or, these days on a stylus tablet too.
I draw accurately in 2D with sketchup, much faster than I use to do in CAD, with the same and even more info than before, as I have textures and areas directly retrievable from faces, dimensions and tags very fastly done in either sketchup or Layout. As I’m working in 2D at this stage, layout doesn’t even blink. It’s immediately responsive. Much better than AutoCAD and I used to work exclusively in it for years.
After that I don’t waste my time in making a 3D for presentation to clients. I build a 3D model for working and iterating the project with my whole team and stakeholders. It’s a step further.
Did I need to for my own visualization of the project? I used to think I didn’t, when I worked with 2D CAD.
Now that I do the 3D model and work with it, I’m thinking why do I need 2D for moving forward?
Spaces, elevations, shadows dropping in, phot real materias and lighting, vegetation, experimentation with ceiling shapes, stairs, getting a sketch that looks like a person at the right scale into it.
In this sens it’s better than 2D and better than a physical model. It doesn’t replace drawing sketches or building the physical models for some stuff, you might still want to create 2D drawings in CAD, but a 3D is richer info in mant more fronts, therefore better for creating whatever we want if you can use it fluently.
3D is, therefore, not for limited people that can’t understand 2D.
It’s an extra and, depending on the workflow, better. For some people worse, but it allows more people to understand what we do.
Architecture is, after all, teamwork. Ideas flow the more you see, the more you communicate and the more you test.
2D is not only limiting all this, it requires a lot of 2D work for sections, elevations, etc. Extra drawings that you don’t have to draw if you use 3D.
3D takes a bit longer to model but in Sketchup it’s fast. It pays up and it’s a what you see is what you get approach.
It gives room for a way more creative and iterative process. As it relates to the extra dimension of space that 2D lacks.
We base our execution plans on a 2D workflow, inside SketchUp and inside the model, derived from it’s 3D shape.
Section Cut Face plugin for 1:10, 1:5, 1:2 and 1:1 or Skalp from 1:100 to 1:20
I play and work with SketchUp and it’s rewarding.
AutoCAD was never rewarding. It was painful and
for the most part uncreative.
Sketchup is only uncreative when Layout gets stuck.