Skip to content or navigation


AIA: Notes from Miami

Some notes from the AIA Miami Convention.

Advertisement

After arriving late Wednesday to a welcoming host from my college days I quickly reminded by body that the world’s climate range extended far beyond the limits of my southern California and New England exposure. Yes, it is hot in Miami. But more than that it is moist!

After a wonderful evening dinner with old friends (and some new ones!) along the beautiful shore of Biscanye Bay I settled into the AIA Convention’s activities with several BIM sessions on the agenda for Thursday and Friday. The first of these was a session titled BIM for Building Skins: The Future of Facade Design, Engineering, Fabrication, and Construction. This was an event sponsored by Thornton Tomasetti and presented by Mark E. Dannettel, LEED AP, and Joseph Burns, PE, SE, FAIA.

Mr. Burns reminded the audience that structural engineering firms have been some of the leading users of BIM (Building Information Modeling) software and that this evolution for them began as far back as the 1980’s when architects like Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry began a movement in architecture that moved away from orthogonal architecture. With that move engineers and steel fabricators were forced to turn to computer systems to help them design and manufacturer the structural components of these complex buildings.

The purpose of this excellent session (and this was indeed an excellent session) was to review the process of how complex building skins are actually designed, from the architect’s initial ideas to the eventual fabrication of custom extrusions, gaskets and unusual-shaped glass panels. The one poignant message delivered in this session was that today’s BIM tools don’t actually help this process much. In fact they can make things worse. There is no need to cite names mentioned in this session because they all suffer in this regard roughly the same.

01 - Image of slide from presentation. Thornton Tomasetti has been a worldwide leader in the implementation of BIM in structural engineering.

It turns out that what matters most and what engineering firms like Thornton Tomasetti really need from architects and their BIM tools is very accurate geometry of the outside surface of the glass skin. That’s it! Just about anything else passed on is practically useless for a whole host of reasons which I’ll come back to in a later report.

Over the next several days starting today I’ll be publishing a series of event reports and highlights from the 2010 AIA Conference in Miami, including many items from those companies which are exhibiting here on the show floor. Some highlights there include the fact that the modo folks, Luxology, are here. As is Bunkspeed! And this year there is an entire Rhino developer area with many interesting third-party developers showing off specific tools for building design.

Reader Comments

  1. Posted by:
    MDannettel
    June 14, 2010 05:11 pm EDT

    For clarity, i would just like to note: The presentation emphasized that the standard design-build nature of facade sub-contracts is what creates a ‘discontinuity’ in the BIM process for building skins. Often, the specialist facade contractor will try to carry forward the geometry from the ‘design’ models.. but the modeling of any members or details would normally re-start from ‘scratch’.

Comments are closed.

architosh

INSIDER Xpresso 
Monthly newsletter with a focus on emTech (AI, machine learning, AAD, AR, robotics, 3d printing, and smart cities) its impact on CAD professionals.)

Subscribe now — it’s free!.

INSIDER Xpresso keeps CAD industry professionals up-to-date on next-gen emerging technologies (emTech) that will revolutionize the worlds of AEC and manufacturing and design. As an Xpresso reader, you will hear from some of the most important voices inventing and using the very latest tech in areas such as AI, machine learning, algorithm-aided design (AAD), AR, VR, MR, 3D printing, 3D computer vision, robotics, and SmartCities technologies.

Each issue arrives in your inbox on the first Sunday of the month. Issue #1 arrived on March 3, 2019. Full archives and easy navigation for your pleasure. Enjoy! 

Sign-up for our monthly newsletter
architosh INSIDER Xpresso.

  • Architosh will never pass any of your information onto third parties.
  • For more information read our privacy policy.
  • It is easy to unsubscribe at any time. Follow the links in the newletter footer.

(Recommended. These infrequent sponsored emails help us to provide our Xpresso newsletter for free.)

 
INSIDER Membership

Read 3 free Feature or Analysis articles per month.

Or, subscribe now for unlimited full access to Architosh.