AIA: Pictures from the Show Floor and Around the Convention – Part 3

We continue our show floor photos here in part 3.

This year Graphisoft, as usual, released their latest BIM package ArchiCAD 17 just in time for the AIA National Convention and in addition to being on the show floor the company had several related events planned, including a Tweetup for ArchiCAD fans and users and a good related seminar by noted award-winning architecture firm Orcutt Winslow architect Russ Sanders AIA, who head’s that larger firm’s IT practices, based on ArchiCAD on the Mac.

01 – Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD booth with its massive Open BIM sign seemed to anchor the entire Software Pavilion section of the show floor.

This is a bit of a distant show of the Graphisoft booth–which was a big booth zone dead smack in the middle of the Software Pavilion area of the show floor. This location tends to get a lot of traffic because it is in the heart of the software area. Interestingly, the Graphisoft booth is deliberately very porous spatially and encourages people to enter. However, they don’t have a theater space, instead peripheral demo stations ring their booth. The highlight signature part of their booth is the Open BIM logo mark that hangs high in the area, very noticeable from a distance.

02 – The Nemetschek Vectorworks booth was well attended and had some interesting items, like their Napkin sketch contest.

Nemetschek Vectorworks’ annual release cycle times for a fall release so the company typically shows off their Vectorworks Architect product that has been in the market place for many months. The company has a growing product portfolio now with their mobile and cloud offerings and this year AIA National timed well for their recent update to Nemetschek Nomad 2.0, their iOS, Android and Kindle mobile application for working with CAD and BIM data in the cloud.

In addition Nomad and Vectorworks Cloud Services sessions, the company presented various sessions on Vectorworks in general, BIM and IFC and a session on a Vectorworks to CINEMA 4D workflow. If you count the sessions on C4D and 3ds Max over at Autodesk and all the SketchUp rendering guys the total number of rendering tools at AIA National Denver likely outnumbered any other type of software tool, marking “visualization” as perhaps the strongest interest topic in software.

03 – Larimar Street in downtown Denver, a few blocks from the Convention Center. A very festive street with Christmas tree lights above.

Downtown Denver is quite charming in many areas. While I only walked around areas near the Colorado Convention Center–itself on 14th and Welton Street, from several taxi drives many areas were especially well taken care of. A really neat area is 16th Street, which is entirely pedestrian with a street trolley in the middle.

And I did get a chance to visit some Colorado nature. This is just in the foothills west of Littleton and beyond the infamous Columbine, Colorado. I wish I could recall the exact name of this state park but I can’t unfortunately. Nonetheless, the landscape was beautiful and my proximity to Columbine didn’t sway my view that this isn’t a bad place to live.

04 – A state park area just west of Littleton, Colorado on the suburban outskirts of Denver. It doesn’t take more than 45 minutes from downtown Denver to begin to experience this kind of countryside. Just beyond these hills becomes the eastern edge of the Colorado Rockies.

We are a bit shy on photos this year but will have very detailed reports following as we aim to wrap up our AIA Denver reports shortly. Stay tuned for details on Autodesk FormIT, Autodesk Dynamo, Gehry Technologies’ GTeam, an HP party plus the Russ Sanders talk at AIA and more. Just after wrapping that up we’ll be covering news from SIGGRAPH 2013.