More on BIM, and a Look at the New Acrobat 3D

AECbytes starts this month by publishing a thought-provoking Viewpoint article entitled "The Ten Bytes of Architecture? Some Thoughts on Architectural Culture in the Age of Simulation" by David Scheer, Principal of the award-winning Salt Lake City firm, Scheer and Scheer, Inc. Scheer looks at how building information modeling, the web, and other related technologies that are at the heart of digital design will fundamentally impact what it means to be an architect. As an educator as well as a practitioner, he also speculates on what changes should be made in architecture curricula to prepare future architects for their new roles.

This will be followed by a report on the BIM Symposium that was held on Feb 1 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I was invited to deliver the keynote address, and other featured speakers included representatives from the leading AEC firms of KieranTimberlake, NBBJ, and Mortenson Construction. The Symposium was very well attended by local industry professionals, and both the presentations as well as the questions from the audience made for a very stimulating discussion.

Also on the agenda is a review of the newly released Adobe Acrobat 3D, which marks an exciting step in the development of the ubiquitous PDF file format. In the increasingly 3D design world, Acrobat 3D allows document-based 3D design collaboration capabilities to be extended to virtually anyone across and beyond global organizations. AEC professionals can convert 3D models from a wide variety of CAD and BIM applications and embed them into Adobe PDF files, which can then be viewed by anyone, even if they don't have the authoring CAD and BIM software.

And finally, Tips and Tricks will return with two new tutorials on Revit and ArchiCAD. So stay tuned.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > February 2006