The AIA 2007 National Convention and Expo, and a Viewpoint by Neil Katz

AECbytes starts this month with a newsletter capturing the highlights of the technology products and services that were on display at the 2007 AIA National Convention and Expo, held in San Antonio from May 3 to 5. This is followed by a more detailed look at some of the "Supporting Technologies" demonstrated at the show that have emerged to extend the capabilities of BIM to different aspects of design and construction. Many of them are in the area of BIM content and content management, and as you will see, they raise an interesting question of how exactly the AEC industry wants its BIM content.

The AECbytes Viewpoint Series returns this month with a Viewpoint by Neil Katz, who has been with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for over 20 years working on the computational design aspects of many projects, often suggesting solutions to geometrically complex issues that arise in the design process, and typically creating computational tools to address these. He has done a lot of work on parametric modeling as a design approach, and shows how he has been using AutoCAD—which is not typically considered a parametric modeling tool—as a perfectly acceptable tool for applying this approach.

Also on the agenda are two new Tips and Tricks articles, one on perspective matching in the new Photoshop CS3 Extended application, and the second on organizing and cataloging details in ArchiCAD.

Please continue to visit the AECbytes Blog to share any of your thoughts, comments, and questions related to AECbytes articles, and see what others have to say.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > May 2007