Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath : How can AEC Technology Help?

It was only last month that I wrote about Hurricane -resistant design in my report on the Alabama AIA Annual Convention, held in Orange Beach, Alabama from July 31 to August 2. During my drive to the convention center along the coast of Alabama, I had witnessed first-hand the enormous devastation caused by Hurricane Ivan last year, which was still very much in evidence, and I described some of the sessions at the conference that were related to Hurricane s, disaster assessment, reviewing building damage, and so on. Little did anyone present at that convention know that a far more deadly Hurricane would soon hit and wash out practically the entire city of New Orleans, and that it would be immediately followed by another powerful Hurricane which would worsen the damage and devastate other areas of the Gulf Coast.

While the immediate needs of the regions affected by Hurricane s Katrina and Rita are monetary contributions and volunteers to assist in the rescue, relief, and rehabilitation efforts, it is going to be a tremendous challenge over the long run to rebuild New Orleans and other affected areas along the Gulf Coast. While the technological resources we currently have at our disposal were evidently not sophisticated enough to prevent the disastrous consequences of the recent Hurricane s, can technology play a more critical role in the future in allowing us to design cities and buildings that don't suffer the same fate New Orleans did? This month's issue of the "Building the Future" series looks at how technology is being used right now in the relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts along the Gulf Coast, and what technologies we might need in the future for cities prone to natural disasters to combat them more effectively.

It may be hard to feel excited about BIM technology right now with the recent Hurricane tragedies, but the expansion of Autodesk Revitfrom a single application to a platform for multi-disciplinary design—a process that was initiated in March with the release of Autodesk RevitBuilding 8 for architectural design, followed by Autodesk RevitStructure 1 in June—should be a critical step in speeding up the transition of the AEC industry from CAD to BIM. Last month, Autodesk released updated versions of both these products: RevitBuilding 8.1 and RevitStructure 2. The main enhancement in these two releases is that they are interoperable with each other, allowing architects and engineers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively than was possible with the drawing-based processes of the AutoCAD era. AECbytes is publishing back-to-back, consolidated reviews of both these products this month. The first issue looks at the new features in the main RevitBuilding 8 release and the updated 8.1 version, while the following issue reviews RevitStructure 1 and the new integrating capability in RevitStructure 2.

On a totally different track, we also have a Viewpoint by Mark Sawyer, CEO of @Last Software which develops the popular conceptual design tool, SketchUp, who takes a fresh look at the customer-vendor relationship in the AEC software industry. He argues that software companies should stop being vendors—who simply sell what they have in stock—and instead become part of the customer's virtual organization, whose sole purpose is to deliver software that allows the customers to do their job their way.

Thank you
Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > September 2005