Reviews Galore, and a Viewpoint from Paul Seletsky

Paul Seletsky returns to the AECbytes Viewpoint series once again, this time with an article that takes a detailed look at the dichotomy of digital technology’s impact on architectural practice, which has not yet significantly altered the established landscape of paper-driven documentation or design process, while threatening architects as primary leaders of the design process by, ironically, increasing productivity. Making his points through historical examples and comparisons with other professions such as medicine, Seletsky also 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. His article is entitled "The Digital Design Ecosystem: Toward a Pre-Rational Architecture" and it is also the forward to a new book on digital practice that is due to be published in the summer.

We then move to a series of product reviews of architectural design applications, starting with Allplan BIM 2008 Architecture, a BIM application that is not that well known in the US but is very popular in Europe. Allplan is the flagship product of the German company, Nemetschek, which was founded all the way back in 1963 and has been developing software products for the building industry since that time. Allplan has thus a long history in the AEC industry, and it ranks along with Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD as one of the first object-oriented architectural CAD applications, which are now referred to as BIM. Even in the pre-BIM days, Allplan was a very powerful and sophisticated application. We will see how it now compares with other leading BIM applications such as Revit, ArchiCAD, and Bentley Architecture. Later on in the month, we will look at the new releases of both AutoCAD Architecture and Revit Architecture, which were announced by Autodesk in February and are now available.

And finally, the Tips and Tricks series for this month presents the second part of the tutorial on using the Project Navigator in AutoCAD Architecture, as well as a neat technique for converting a single still photo into a short video using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > April 2008