We made a foray into designing and building a brand new house and let me tell you, my fellow HNers, the state of affairs with the design part is ABYSMAL, even in a reasonably modern architect firm.

Basically you first design, for look and feel, then you calculate technical details, then you build. Or rather the architect does all three, but you would normally want to "chip in" during the design phase - change the layout, move things around, etc. That's where things get bloody awful.

I wasn't expecting full VR tours of the place (though it is doable [1]), but I did expect to be able to walk through the place in 3D and see how it will look like in the winter morning and summer afternoon. Hell no. What are you smoking?

Floor plans. Planimetric facades. Roll your eyes to the ceiling and imagine. 3D renders that looks like from the early 00s take hours to produce, so they aren't done often. That's _still_ renders, mind you. 3D walk-abouts are possible, but they look like butt and they are viewed as the final step of the process, when everything has been done and done.

And this is with firms where principles are in their 40s and generally computer literate. It just seems that the industry is very conservative with its tooling choices AND these tools are also ridiculously expensive, further stifling any desire to switch. So they are stuck with using technical design software like ArchiCAD (good for laying out piping, calculating stress, air flow, etc.) for visual design. And the resulting process is sooooo slow, small changes and iterations take hours if not days to complete, so it takes weeks to converge to a general design of the house.

Painful, painful process. Ugh. Caveat emptor.

[1] https://www.benoitdereau.com/