HOK’s 2nd Annual BIM Awards

§ January 26th, 2012 § Filed under Newsletters and Features § No Comments

This article takes a look at the projects selected as the finalists in HOK’s 2nd Annual BIM Awards competition. This is an internal competition to evaluate and award projects within HOK that have exhibited exemplary use of BIM technology in one of four major categories; Design, Delivery, Collaboration, and Visualization. I was invited to serve on the jury of the competition and therefore had the opportunity to review all the finalist’s presentations and get an understanding of their projects.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2012/HOK_BIM_Awards.html

Adopting Lean Practices in the Architectural/Engineering Industry

§ January 19th, 2012 § Filed under Viewpoints § 1 Comment

Lean Business Practices have been adopted in many industries such as automotive design and build, aircraft design and build, and ever increasingly by leading construction companies. What are the best practices the Architecture/Engineering (A/E) design industries can adopt and utilize? David Haynes, Director of Consulting for Ideate Inc., sheds more light on these issues in this Viewpoint article.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2012/issue_63.html

AEC Exhibitor Highlights from Autodesk University 2011

§ December 15th, 2011 § Filed under "Building the Future" articles § No Comments

This article captures the highlights of those products that were exhibited at the recent Autodesk University which are relevant to the AEC industry, including Revit-integrated applications such as Trelligence Affinity, FM:Interact which now provides mobile access, e-SPECS, CodeBook, an interesting new tool called VIMtrek which allows game-like navigation of a Revit model, ClearEdge3D, which develops software for automatically extracting 3D geometry from point cloud data, IMAGINiT’s new ProductivityNOW portal, and updated hardware solutions from Supermicro, HP, Dell, Contex, and Nvidia.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2011/AU2011_Exhibitors.html

Autodesk University 2011: General Session and Innovation Forums

§ December 12th, 2011 § Filed under Newsletters and Features § No Comments

This article on the recent Autodesk University 2011 captures the highlights of the general session keynote and three “innovation forums” on the topics of the cloud, social networking, and sustainability, along with some AEC industry technology news I was able to glean at the event. This year, Autodesk dispensed with the industry keynotes that it typically schedules following the main general session keynote and instead had several cross-industry innovation forums that were intended to provide a broader view of emerging technologies and issues relevant to all disciplines.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2011/issue_54.html

The AR LAB: A Vision

§ December 6th, 2011 § Filed under Viewpoints § 4 Comments

In this Viewpoint article, Paul Seletsky, who is the Digital Design Director at KieranTimberlake Associates, questions the current architectural education approach of providing sophisticated design tools to students, only to have them go on to practice professionally for decades on another level using outmoded means. He envisions another approach, where applied research centers would bring architects, universities, and the public together to advance Building Design using the latest Digital Design tools. Under the imprimatur of the national architectural association and in affiliation with local universities, well-equipped and staffed architecture research labs (AR Labs) would enable students and practitioners to develop design ideas both physically and digitally, build 3D mock-ups, learn new fabrication methods, and perform energy analyses and simulations via BIM.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2011/issue_62.html

Industry-Wide National BIM Standard: A Progress Report

§ November 29th, 2011 § Filed under "Building the Future" articles § No Comments

This article by Chuck Eastman, Manu Venugopal, and Shiva Aram of Georgia Tech describes a demonstration of the initial results of the National Precast BIM Standard that was held at the PCI Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, in Oct 2011. The National Precast BIM Standard is the  first domain-wide specification exchange effort in the AEC industry, defined to address all the major exchanges dealing with precast concrete elements throughout the product lifecycle. Five different precast concrete software systems participated in the demonstration; six exchanges were made between these applications using Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as the neutral data schema; and two other applications were used to visualize the exchanged data.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2011/NBIM-ProgressReport.html

« Older Entries