AIA: Pictures from the Show Floor and Around the Convention – Part 1

Denver played a nice host to this year’s AIA National Convention and Exhibition. The weather was sunny and very warm most of the week. And the city is pleasant to walk around in and around the area of the convention center and the many hotels where most folks were staying.

We thought we’d show some pictures from the show. Bear in mind that many that we show of booths are purposely oriented at showing “what” was on display in the booth and sometimes we need to wait for people to get out of the way. This makes the booth look not well attended, but rest assured most booths were heavily attended–especially those we are talking about in our AIA reports.

01 – The Denver convention center.

This view from from the south main intersection along the block that makes up the convention center shows a super cantilever. It actually extends about 30 percent over the actual street. The Denver Convention Center was built in two phases starting in 1990 and then in 2004. Both were designed by Denver architect Curtis W. Fentress of Fenstress Architects, an international practice located in Denver.

02 – The adjacent parking structure holds 1000 cars and has a very cool undulating metal screen facade overlay, which you can see from this image.

The adjacent parking structure next to the convention center had a very glimmering metal screen facade that undulated in smooth curves as a counter point of sorts to the angular projection on the convention center’s roof above. This entire section of Denver is quite nice to walk around yet there were many–too many–parking lots and available areas where additional new developments could take place.

03 – Altair surprised us by being in attendance at AIA. They were showing several items but principally a wind-tunell technology they are working on bringing to market for the AEC space. They were also showing solidThinking Inspire.

One of the surprise highlights of the AIA software show floor was the presence of Altair Corporation. We will be talking in more detail later about Altair and its intensions within the AEC software space but at the show they were showing some upcoming software technology for “form finding” and conceptual engineering using both Altair’s FEA (finite element analysis) engineering technology and technology from the solidThinking group which exist in solidThinking Inspire.

04 – HP’s new printing on textiles technology offerings offer some intriguing suggestions for designers.

We spent a fair amount of time talking to the HP folks showing DesignJets and also some of their new capabilities. One of the more intriguing items was their new software and solutions for printing on textiles, including vinyl. The HP group also hosted a little cocktail party for press and others and talked about the company’s commitments to meeting the needs of architects and designers with upcoming solutions. One item that was clearly acknowledged at that event was that HP isn’t just sitting around watching the 3D solid printing market take off around them. So we take that to mean they are possibly going to have something in the market at some point. That would likely excite many.