AECbytes Blog

Four years ago, the architecture and planning firm Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company created a strategic technology committee to see what leading firms were doing to improve project delivery. This was born from a high degree of frustration with the technology the firm had at that time, from CAD to communications, which seemed inefficient at a time when clients were demanding more in less time. In this Viewpoint article, Design Principal Stephen C. Wright, who chaired the firm’s strategic technology committee, reflects on the changes that have restored the firm’s operational excellence.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_38.html

In this Viewpoint article, Paul Seletsky, Sr. Mgr. of Digital Design, SOM New York, reflects on the impact of digital technology on architectural practice, and shares some of the ideas behind the Digital Design Ecosystem, a joint initiative between Georgia Tech, Square One Ecotect, Gehry Technologies and SOM, that uses advanced computation to impart tacit and explicit experience into the earliest stages of conceptual exploration.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_37.html

Co-authored by a team of academics including Youngjin Yoo of Temple University and Richard J. Boland and Kalle Lyytinen of Case Western Reserve University, this article describes their NSF sponsored research on several major projects by Frank Gehry in which his firm used CATIA to model the complex geometry of their buildings and how that has influenced the way he works with owners, contractors, subcontractors, engineers and fabricators. It also includes a call for AEC firms to participate in their follow-up study, which is also being funded by the NSF, to track the broader set of information technologies that are increasingly used in AEC projects and to identify their consequences.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_36.html

This Viewpoint article by Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholz, Rafael Sacks and Kathleen Liston offers a perspective on emerging positions such as BIM Specialist, BIM Champion, BIM Administrator, 4D Specialist, and Manager of Virtual Design and Construction and suggests their roles and responsibilities at the corporate and project levels within owner organizations and the AEC firms that serve them.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_35.html

In this Viewpoint article, Dominic Gallello, CEO of Graphisoft, discusses the new professional role that is emerging in the AEC industry, the “BIM Manager.” He argues that the BIM Manager is not just a nice-to-have but rather a fundamental member of a model-based design process, and discusses various aspects of this role, including the need for non-linear thinking, multi-disciplinary thinking, and other qualifications.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_34.html

In this Viewpoint article, Tammy McCuen and Major Patrick Suermann, P.E., two academics who are closely involved with the National Building Information Modeling Standard (NBIMS) effort, discuss the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) that is being developed as part of the NBIMS to become a tool for BIM users to evaluate their practices and processes. They also describe a joint project between the AIA and NBIMS in which an interactive version of the CMM was applied to each of the 2007 TAP BIM award winners in order to test the model against real-world BIM projects.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2007/issue_33.html

In this Viewpoint article, Neil Katz, who has spent over 20 years at SOM working on the computational design aspects of many projects, shows how he has been using AutoCAD–which is typically not considered as a parametric tool–as a perfectly acceptable tool for applying parametric modeling as a design approach.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2007/issue_32.html

In this Viewpoint article, Ondrej Kalny, Editor of BridgeArt.net and UseWiki.net, describes the emerging technology of Enterprise Wiki, its analogy with BIM, and its potential for addressing the communication problems in the AEC industry.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2007/issue_31.html