INSIDER Report No. 4

This year the theme is organized around innovative leadership—as Architosh and its editors see the industry and as INSIDER Xpresso readers engage around certain emTech (emerging technology) topics in our monthly newsletter.

Xpresso readers are far more engaged with computational design than robotics in architect, for example. While automation technologies in construction have been de rigueur for most of 2020—and a good testament of that is our Xpresso newsletter coverage—the collapse of AEC construction automation darling Katerra has been a real stunner.

Process progress in AEC is relentlessly challenging but hundreds of point-solutions are making substantial headway in the design and engineering and the construction side of the industry.

INSIDER Report No. 4 highlights five technology firms serving the AEC and CAD/3D-based industries that we believe are rising stars in software, hardware, and services and making a big impact in their respective markets with their industry-leading innovations. Take a look at the list of five INSIDER features below and read our summary explanations.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction — Five Rising Stars
• Remote Work Has A New Partner in Varjo’s VR-3 and XR-3 Headsets
• The Fourth Revolution — How Spacemaker AI Optimizes Architecture Development
• Shapr3D is Bold on Apple and CAD Dominance
• Augmented Intelligence: Digital Blue Foam’s Alternative Approach to Generative Design in Architecture
• Beyond the CDE — Layer App and its Remarkable Fluid Power

The introduction listed on the report cover graphic in this article (show below) is what you are reading here.

architosh INSIDER Report #04 — focuses on five rising tech stars (firms) making an impact on AEC/CAD/3D industries.

To get a bigger look at the cover graphic, click on the image directly above you. Its image pertains to the Varjo feature and specifically to the virtual teleportation technologies the Finnish VR/XR headset maker just introduced a month ago.

Five Rising Stars

In this section, we briefly summarize our thoughts about the impacts and innovations of five key technology companies, in order: Varjo (Finland), Spacemaker (Norway), Shapr3D (Hungary), Digital Blue Foam (Singapore), and Layer (USA).

Right away we can notice the global diversity of innovation leaders.

1 – Varjo

Varjo’s VR-1 headset introduced a few years ago at the height of the virtual reality boom was a standout solution with its groundbreaking Bionic Display. Like several of the other innovators in this group of five tech stars, Varjo’s technologies found accelerated adoption in areas perhaps not envisioned. The VR-1 was indeed adopted by designers—including architects like Foster + Partners—but in general, the AEC market wasn’t where they met success. Instead, they met with big success in places like aerospace and auto design and specifically once the XR-1 was introduced with “simulation” and training markets.

In the title image above, an XR-3 user is inside a building under construction. He looks up and can see an “animated train pass through the partially constructed building.” This is the fully occluded 3D visualization that can be seamlessly integrated with the pass-thru video. This image shows a user somewhere else, watching whatever the XR-3 user sees. The red glow of this room (in the image above) helps us see the screen as the XR-3 user sees it in the title image. 

Varjo’s innovations are set to make an outsized impact as the company unleashes its Reality Cloud and virtual teleportation technologies. In the pandemic and post-pandemic context, virtual meetings and the nature of collaboration are transformed forever. Technologies like Reality Cloud and the latest Varjo VR and XR headsets are set for much greater adoption and this will drive down this gear’s costs as Wright’s Law makes its impact. That’s where virtual teleportation gets really exciting and we see great potential with the Dimension10 acquisition allowing for Varjo to focus specifically on targeted AEC industry solutions.

“Remote Work Has A New Partner in Varjo’s VR-3 and XR-3 Headsets” takes the reader on a little journey, noting the pandemic’s role in the acceleration of this technology type, and walks through the specific technology innovations up to the Reality Cloud.

2 – Spacemaker AI

Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost told me on a call last year that Spacemaker AI had the best artificial intelligence in the world focused on this particular problem area: early design phases in architecture and urban development. The only company of the five in this issue acquired by a much larger company, Spacemaker too has refocused its target customer shifting initially from architects to large developers who could afford its large price tag. In “The Fourth Revolution—How Spacemaker AI Optimizes Architecture Development” we learn from its co-founders how the AEC industry is lacking the basic building blocks to make large-scale optimization possible with digital technologies.

Autodesk’s acquisition of Spacemaker should ultimately democratize the Norwegian company’s technologies so that smaller firms can afford to benefit from over-the-shoulder AI systems. 

There are two things exciting about this company. One is that open realization and its desire to do something about that, and two is its mission to usher in this so-called “fourth revolution” which enables “over-the-shoulder AI” to the masses. Of course, like almost all the five companies included in this issue, they have had to start with very large customers for practical business reasons. The Autodesk acquisition should lead to the democratization of their AI-based technologies, helping smaller firms utilize over-the-shoulder AI as well.

3 – Shapr3D 

Hungarian-based Shapr3D is included in this group because they are one of the fastest-growing CAD companies in history. And because they have astonishingly grown that fast mostly on the Apple iPad Pro platform. “Shapr3D is Bold on Apple and CAD Dominance” focuses on the company’s recent push to the desktop CAD market focusing on where they believe the future lies—on ARM-based systems.

Intimately familiar with the iPad’s performance growth and Apple’s chip leadership, Shapr3D isn’t holding back their enthusiasm and confidence about Apple’s chip transition to custom Apple Silicon and moving away from the Intel X86 architecture. With Qualcomm buying Nuvia, a chip company formed by ex-Apple chief chip architects, and setting its sights on the competition with Apple for laptop and mobile devices in chip performance leadership, we can expect the industry battle lines to shift from Intel vs AMD to Apple versus Qualcomm for all processors targeting smartphones up to common computer laptops for macOS and Windows and Linux.

Shapr3D on ARM-based Macs is the newest development for the award-winning CAD software company that is bullish on Apple Silicon.

But Shapr3D isn’t just an innovator because they are ahead of the curve relative to silicon and device use transformation, their 3D modeling application is also a superbly great application and an award-winning one at that. This is why its journey to the desktop market is also very exciting.

4 – Digital Blue Foam

Digital Blue Foam made waves two years ago when the AIA was in Las Vegas and Graphisoft hosted its BIM conference just before the AIA show. The Singapore-based company introduced an innovative AI-based generative design platform that addresses many of the same core issues that SpacemakerAI is tackling.

The two applications are essentially competitors and like Spacemaker, Digital Blue Foam has gotten started early with bigger customers, including Japan’s mighty Takenaka, which is one of Japan’s top 5 largest AEC industry companies. They also have secured a larger user in the University of Budapest.

“Digital Blue Foam is the best feasibility study software we know,” says the Takenaka Corporation, a massive AEC company in Japan that includes design, architecture, engineering and construction, and management. 

In “Augmented Intelligence: Digital Blue Foam’s Alternative Approach to Generative Design in Architecture,” we learn about the company’s stealth beginnings, its architect-educated and trained co-founders, and unique features such as its Pen Tool that enables human designers to iterate with machine learning-based generative solutions.

5 – Layer

Layer app may be seen as a controversial selection to be included alongside such acquisitions as Spacemaker and well-funded Scandinavian tech leaders as Varjo. However, I feel that Layer is one of the more modern applications in the market with particular strength in its data flexibility and independence. While Layer today does have a plug-in connection to Autodesk Revit, the app itself is widely used without any connection to a BIM or CAD application at all. Like nearly all the companies noted above, Layer initially targeted architects but found particular strength in other sectors—notably in the facilities management sector. It is especially strong in the hospital sub-sector of AEC.

Layer’s flexibility with data and form-creation means that users can craft their own individualized “data-centric” workflow solutions. It also has a Slack-like system for team communication using hashtags that can link all kinds of stuff together. Their goal is to be a full-featured CDE (common data environment) and the app is getting closer and closer to that destination. They have recently introduced slick model view functionality that will serve them well for more advanced CDE functions down the road.

Layer boasts direct Revit Add-on functionality, bi-directional synchronization, and a truly modern, responsive user interface across all device types and platforms, democratizing access to AEC project information no matter how the user chooses to connect to it. It also now has a full-on 3D BIM model view with a game-like navigation system. 

In our article “Beyond the CDE — Layer App and its Remarkable Fluid Power” the reader learns why their app is very modern, how it can run so seamlessly on mobile platforms as well as desktop, and why their early development choices allow them to focus on features, not platform plumbing, and how soon they will bring in other model types like Rhino, IFC, SketchUp and more.

Closing Thoughts

With the exception of SpacemakerAI, all of these companies could be upcoming targets for an acquisition by a larger AEC or CAD industry player, with the exception of Varjo which could be acquired by a tech heavyweight like Microsoft, Google, or perhaps an Asian giant like Samsung. Autodesk doesn’t have a reason to acquire Digital Blue Foam but an Autodesk rival could easily snatch them up. Layer already integrates with Autodesk BIM 360 but Layer’s goals for staying independent and connecting to “everyone’s” BIM will enable them to grow quite a bit over time. Plus, as the digital twins market continues to grow, Layer may have many interesting growth paths and ultimately become a much more valuable company for acquisition later on.

One of the more interesting companies here to think about is Shapr3D. This company is going after the MCAD market—really going for its future. Its place in AEC is not yet clear, but the app is built on Parasolid, runs amazingly fast, and has the intuitive feel of SketchUp but is a vastly more sophisticated modeler fundamentally. Where Shapr3D evolves with respect to the AEC market is an evolving question.

Editor’s Note

We updated this story with pictures with captions, additional URL links and some minor added material, and small edits on 27 July 2021. 

The post INSIDER: Introduction — Five Rising Stars appeared first on Architosh.

Enter Varjo

To work at the same fidelities as real life with human eyes, there are few options in the market with the technical competencies of Finnish VR-XR headset maker Varjo. The company’s latest headsets began shipping worldwide this past March, into a global pandemic context that still has many enterprise companies working remotely and limiting business travel.

“Customers are using our headsets for multi-hour simulations and collaborative sessions,” says Urho Konttori, co-founder and chief innovation officer, Varjo, when mentioning improvements made to the comfort and usability of the VR-3 and XR-3 over prior generations of the devices. (Image 01)  In this pandemic context—which may continue for a year or more—travel is more limited. “Design reviews used to be once a month in Korea,” says Konttori when speaking of device user Kia. “Now, they meet for extended [virtual] sessions.”

The new 3-point precision fit headband offers a 40 percent lighter weight than the previous unit and includes active cooling. “We redesigned the head strap to take the weight away from the forehead and reduce pressure,” Konttori adds, noting that other VR headsets often place too much pressure on the forehead for long-session comfort. And the ultra-wide optical design aids in removing eye strain and simulator sickness, crucial for long-session simulation training using the XR-3. (Image 01) 

01 – Varjo’s new XR-3 (left) and VR-3 (right) headsets bring twice the performance and lower costs, enabling more professionals to embrace the leading edge of VR/XR technologies. (click on image to see larger)

In the pandemic context having VR/XR headsets be far more comfortable is a critical feature, but not the only one. Cleaning the device is now very important. “All the materials are super hygienic,” he adds, “and they also support UV cabinets for Covid cleaning.” With these improvements and the advancements in ergonomics, Varjo believes their VR-3 and XR-3 are the industry’s best devices for virtual reality and mixed-reality long-form sessions and simulations.

Full-Frame Bionic Display

Varjo’s ground-breaking innovation has always been its patented Bionic Display(TM) technology, delivering the world’s only VR with human-eye resolution. With the latest VR-3 and XR-3 headsets, the company has brought its Bionic Display technology full-frame.

In earlier models, the human-eye resolution section was contained in a smaller center section of the display. The system still uses two different displays, a 70 PPD micro OLED 1920 x 1920 retina level (human eye) display for the Focused area (same as the earlier model) and a 30 PPD LCD 2880 x 2720 display for the Peripheral area—much larger than the previous generation’s 1440 x 1600 AMOLED display. (Image 02)

02 – Varjo’s Bionic (Human Eye Resolution) Display technology is shown on right compared to the typical consumer VR headset display resolution shown on left. The resolution is so life-like that Varjo has quickly established itself as the industry leader for virtual simulation markets in aerospace, medicine, and industrial applications.  (click on image to see larger)

Software and hardware optically combine both displays into the game-changing full-frame Bionic Display in the VR-3 and XR-3 headsets, resulting in twice the previous models’ performance. Enhancing the Bionic Display further is a larger 115-degree field of view (FoV). And the XR-3 has all new lenses.  Additionally, the XR-3 and VR-3 have the world’s fastest and most accurate eye-tracking capabilities, via integrated Ultraleap technology, up to 200Hz, giving users optimized visual fidelity through foveated rendering.

New Lidar

The XR-3 introduces, for the first time, new integrated Lidar technology into the headset. With the industry’s first depth awareness in a VR/MR/XR headset, the XR-3 merges Lidar and stereo RGB video pass-through to deliver seamless merging of the real and virtual worlds for perfect occlusion and full 3D world reconstruction. The company uses NVIDIA’s deep neural technologies, which are useful for depth data in downstream applications.

The XR-3 also features inside-out tracking, which allows the user to establish the precise position of the XR-3 within an environment. This vastly improves tracking accuracy and removes the need for SteamVR base stations.

Markets and Compatibilities

The XR-3 is a key component of Varjo’s simulations market business, grounded in the defense, aerospace, and medical industries. With Varjo’s first headset (VR-1) and its successors on the market for almost four years now, training and simulation have emerged as its strongest market. The automobile design market is also where Varjo excels, with a strategic partnership with Volvo, made a few years ago.

“High-fidelity is critical for effective mixed reality training for pilots, says Chris Metel, Prepar3D Engineering Program Manager, Lockheed Martin. “Support With the Varjo XR-3, the realism is further increased in Prepar3D, which removes negative training when recreating conditions of the most mission-critical scenarios. Prepar3D v5.1 supports the Varjo XR-3 out of the box, giving all types of pilots an affordable and agile option for training.”

Varjo’s technology includes eye-tracking. “When you put on the headset, the optics move to the center of your eyes,” adds Konttori, “and can provide analytics on what you are looking at…running at 200Hz, which is over the threshold of medical grade.” This type of innovation has led Varjo to market leadership in simulation and is why companies like Lockheed Martin have become enthusiastic users of Varjo’s technologies.

03 – A screen capture from a Varjo user video—this one from Volvo wherein a test vehicle has a projected virtual dashboard that the actual test driver can only see because they are wearing the XR-3 headset with real-time pass-through video. Part of the virtual dashboard is rendered in blue wireframe (right side).

Varjo’s headsets are compatible with all leading VR software tools. “All other software for VR works with VR-3 says,” Konttori, “including Enscape, Twinmotion, Unreal, and others.” The VR-3 and XR-3 are also open standards-compliant and support The Khronos Group’s OpenXR and OpenVR technology standards. The latter has the widest industry adoption. While Varjo’s headsets are not for gamers, technically, they would work. “The people who design the games, in an immersive space, may choose to work out their games from within them,” he adds.

Still, that’s not where Varjo has its prime market interests. Konttori acknowledges that Varjo’s headsets are not aimed at high-volume markets. Still, its innovation ambitions bode well for the vast market of architects, designers, and engineers currently using lesser-grade technologies. “Our goal was we wanted to deliver twice the performance at half the price,” he says, adding, “the price point today is one that can start to democratize this kind of technology.”

And that is exactly the good news numerous industries would want to hear, given the extended post-pandemic context that is likely to make virtual meetings and remote collaborative work a part of normal life going forward.

Reality Cloud

With the VR-3 and XR-3 devices just starting shipping at end of the first quarter this year, the company has already made exciting announcements about its future with the introduction of the Varjo Reality Cloud and ground-breaking teleportation technologies.

04 – An architect in California, for example, can enter a building site and put on the XR-3, and stream her reality to anyone else in the world in real-time using Varjo’s latest technologies. Reality Cloud coming later this year will make this possible.

While these technologies will likely not emerge for full use until 2022, the Reality Cloud and Varjo’s proprietary algorithms have enabled for the first time the ability to virtually teleport any XR-3 user to another location in the world to another XR-3 user and be fully embedded in the first user’s physical environment along with digital 3D virtual immersive imagery. (Images 04 – 06)

05 – A client or collaborator someplace else in the world (eg: Japan) can be teleported to the place (environment) of the California architect. Wearing the XR-3 device plus the technology of Reality Cloud, this second person can be teleported virtually to another place on Earth. (see next image)

An architect in Los Angeles could invite a client currently in Japan to the location of a building site in California, for example, where the architect wearing the XR-3 could enable the client wearing a VR-3 or XR-3 headset to “virtually teleport” the architect’s location. (Images 04-06). The architect’s XR-3 headset would capture its environment with its onboard cameras and LiDAR sensors and stream that data to the Reality Cloud where it would then be streamed down to the client in Japan. (Image 04) Varjo’s proprietary streaming algorithms make the stream into a single megabyte per second (similar to a Netflix movie) live 3D video feed. The client in Japan can virtually occupy the same environment the architect in California is capturing in real-time.

06 – This screen capture image from Varjo’s technology video illustrates that the two XR-3 wearing users can occupy the same space, the second person being teleported to the first person’s location where the XR-3 captures its surroundings and streams them via Reality Cloud to anywhere in the world.

The low-latency video pass-through technology is some of the strongest technology the Finnish company has created, and it gets fused with fully occluded virtual 3D imagery—making it possible for the architect in California to composite digital building elements (eg: BIM object information) over the live 3D actualized building elements all in real-time.

The Future

Varjo isn’t just the most advanced VR/XR headset maker in the world, they possess a significant engaged customer base consisting of world-class global industry leaders. With the June announcement of virtual teleportation and Reality Cloud, Varjo also announced the acquisition of Norwegian company Dimension10, which is an industry leader in deploying VR technologies within AEC industries. Despite having companies like Foster + Partners among its early architect users, Varjo’s AEC market presence has lagged that of other devices like Oculus, HTC Vive, and Microsoft Hololens. But this may change soon—and be accelerated in the lingering Covid pandemic context—as the company leverages and integrates Dimension10 product offerings and technologies with Reality Cloud and their ground-breaking VR/XR headsets.

The post INSIDER: Remote Work Has A New Partner in Varjo’s VR-3 and XR-3 Headsets appeared first on Architosh.

Describing his initial reactions to how architects deliver value in early-stage development for clients, he says, “I didn’t really see the building blocks. People worked in digital tools, but some stakeholders work in drawing applications while others work in Excel.”

New to the AEC industry and with a background as a computer scientist, Christensen used the word “shocked” when he met Spacemaker CEO and co-founder Håvard Haukeland. When Haukeland, an architect, explained how architects deliver early phase work for clients, Christensen assumed Haukeland was doing something wrong.

Driven by Experience

“I was basically working [as an architect] with the kinds of projects that users today are using Spacemaker AI to solve,” says Haukeland. “I was really frustrated that I was not able to deliver what the clients really wanted, and I started discussing this with Anders, who I had known before.”

Anders Kvale is the third co-founder with a business background who saw Haukland’s problems—which involved working with clients who have either acquired a building site or evaluating one—as an interesting problem to look into.

The core challenge was how to optimize the development potential of building sites by breaking free of the traditional toolsets and processes that were leaving Haukeland disappointed. Kvale introduced Haukeland to Christensen, who has deep experience in software development and the digitization of industries.

“So the problem definition was really very clear,” says Christensen. “However, the more you looked into it, the more the complexity grew.”

A Worthy Global Goal

This complexity seemed ideally suited for AI and machine learning, but larger than that, the timing to help urban and architectural development make a big leap was now. “This is a global problem; we need to build so much more in every city,” says Haukeland, referring to massive urbanization change taking place around the world. “When we build more densely, it is technically more difficult. There are more stakeholders and with them comes more complexity.” (Image 01)

01 – A view of Spacemaker’s user interface, this one looking at the effects of noise on building design and parcel development decisions. Noise is just one of the dozens of technical issues impacting urban development that challenges AEC design and development teams to optimize architectural solutions.

But the development process today needs re-engineering itself, and the Nordic team knew this. “So architects have their knowledge expertise, and so too do engineers, and the developer is focused on their goals, but none of them are really communicating in any kind of shared space where they can understand each other in any meaningful way,” says Christensen. “So we figured we needed to bring all this information together in a way that is transparent to the other stakeholders.”

With a clarified vision of the problem Spacemaker AI was aiming to solve, the company began developing its namesake solution and directing it to architects. But that is not where they found success. Architects’ usage of information technology at a budget level is less than 1.5 percent of revenues in some cases, so Spacemaker AI found greater success going directly to large property development firms, who passed Spacemaker technology on to their internal designers and architects, and external consultants.

Value in the Early Phase

Spacemaker AI describes itself as “early-stage planning reimagined.” The cloud-based solution centralizes the various knowledge and issues typically siloed by the A, E, C, and O professionals in the AECO world. It empowers stakeholders to optimize the development potential of building sites. And it uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to achieve this.

Haukland told me on our call that a McKinsey report says that only 20 percent of technology investment in the building industry is directed at early phases. Still, he notes another report that finds that it is the early phases where 50 percent of the value creation happens.

The problem is that value creation can be higher and achieved at faster rates if machine intelligence can augment the heuristic processes human designers employ. Spacemaker AI’s goal isn’t to replace human architects, planners, and urban designers but rather augment them with “over the shoulder AI,” as Haukeland and Christensen call it.

Christensen says of today’s workflows for this early-stage work, “there is a lot of manual labor inside a digital tool, but there is no added value across projects, everything is bespoke.” This takes us back to those building blocks he says the industry is missing. He means that without digital connections between data from various stakeholders and the meaning and values of that data from each stakeholders’ perspective, there is no value-chain present, no value creation. “It’s really hard to extract value and knowledge from such a disconnected process,” he says. “If you are trying to analyze processes and systems, that is just shockingly far from what most industries have already accomplished.”

The Fourth Revolution

Indeed, the AECO industry is profoundly behind taking true advantage of the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) revolution. (see: Architosh, “Perspectives on BEST of SHOW 2018: Perez’s Model of Technological Revolutions—BIM, CDEs, and VR,” 12 July 2018) But the current constellation of digital technologies, particularly when paired with AI and machine learning, may finally offer a step-change in productivity gains.

“You mentioned the revolution of hand drawing to CAD, from CAD to BIM, from BIM to Cloud. And now we have ‘outcome-driven’ design, says Haukeland. “And that’s now the fourth revolution.

Spacemaker AI helps users arrive at optimal outcomes for given building sites, tuning development projects to particular sets of criteria in optimized formations that will yield better outcomes. (Images 01 – 02)

02 – An image of Spacemaker’s interface showing slider controls on the right and data and results options at the bottom.

The software does this by both generating and evaluating designs against inputted criteria. The system can analyze solutions for sunlight, daylight, views, wind, traffic noise, energy efficiency, and all the zoning setbacks and FAR (floor-area-ratios) impacting projects. (see Image 03 for Wind)

Spacemaker AI can optimize designs for over 100 criteria types, including doing all the boring calculation work like tenant lease area and building area calculations. The user inputs the criteria but also determines which criteria to emphasize. You let Spacemaker AI help solve for quality outdoor spaces, for example, by emphasizing sunlight utilization and controlling shadows. It can solve for microclimates and views to the river, for example, and at various combinations of importance.

As for the AI, Christensen says, “it is incrementally supportive of what you want to do but not taking over the wheel,” making a driving analogy. So, in other words, in the same manner, that a Tesla can provide some autonomous driving functions with human oversight, Spacemaker uses artificial intelligence to augment human designers but requires human oversight at multiple levels.

The software is flexible in terms of how it can relate to existing urban design and architectural workflows. “Users can import previous designs in SketchUp or Revit format and run analyses on them using the systems’ AI-based engine for testing scenarios,” he notes. “And once completed, users can export their project out to more precise design programs like SketchUp or Revit.”

Designed to be interactive as part of the overall process, Spacemaker AI enables the designer to generate and test in multiple iterative steps, fine-tuning both criteria and possible design options. The system isn’t there to find the ultimate solution for you by itself.

Christensen says there is confusion in the industry about solutions like Spacemaker AI. He says that “black box AI seems very attractive at the onset,” but that is not what people really want. “You cannot iterate on it,” he says, referring to the way the designer can take what Spacemaker AI has produced and understand why it got there.

The Autodesk Acquisition

Last year Autodesk acquired the Norway-based company. Over the past few years, the US design software giant largely focused on construction professionals within AEC—with a series of stunning acquisitions. In the area of new software for designers and architects, the Spacemaker AI buy was seen as a positive move.

03 – An image showing Spacemaker’s wind analysis functions in action.

“We never talked about an acquisition,” says Haukeland. We always planned for a standalone journey.” He says the company, at 115 people as of the time of our conversation, has been solely focused on its mission. “We are driven by that story. Everyone on the team is driven by how we can optimize the process.”

With that focus, Autodesk is leaving the company to operate very autonomously. The company stays in Norway, though it has staff in remote locations globally.

“Right now,” Haukeland adds, “the obvious synergy with Autodesk is on the mission of being part of that fourth revolution and of making a digital tool that everyone uses.”

The post INSIDER: The Fourth Revolution—How Spacemaker AI Optimizes Architecture Development appeared first on Architosh.

Award Winner App

Before discussing Shapr3D’s path to the new Apple Silicon Macs, it is essential to point out the star-like trajectory of the 3D application itself. The app has won the coveted Apple Design Award at the 2020 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. “That is a tremendous honor,” says Csanady, “because it is super competitive to win that award.” In fact, out of two and a half million apps in the Apple App Store, only about five to ten win this great honor. 

Another remarkable fact that Csanady shared with me on our call is that it has over 16,000 paying customers. “It’s pretty cool if you consider that OnShape had 5,000 paying customers,” says Csanady, referring to the Boston-based CAD company acquired in 2019 by Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), also of Metro Boston. 

The Transformation of CAD

And it took Shapr3D vastly less time to acquire so many customers than the acquisition of the web-based CAD upstart OnShape. “I think we are probably the fastest growing CAD system since SolidWorks, adds Csanady, “which is really quite remarkable considering we have only been available on the Apple iPad Pro.”

And Shapr3D’s success and significant numbers of customers isn’t some “halo effect” of being on a popular Apple device either. If that were the case, if Apple had that kind of power, you would see vastly more CAD applications from the Windows world come on over to Apple’s platforms. Instead, Shapr3D is tapping into some unmet needs not envisioned by the CAD industry’s incumbent leaders. 

01 – Shapr3D is a relatively new and powerful product design and CAD tool exclusively for the Apple iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and now also for Apple Macs that are ARM-based computers—which will be all Mac computers in the next few years.

“Our success is that we are solving a real customer problem,” he injects. “If you look at Shapr3D, it’s really aggressive. The biggest problem with CAD—with the legacy solutions—is it is tough to buy, very hard to use, and it is essentially unchanged for the last 30 years.” 

I asked Csanady to unpack those comments a bit because it seems so trite to characterize the CAD industry in those terms. “It means the CAD tools being used today were all designed for the needs of the 1990s,” he shoots back. “Literally, everything has changed since then, from how we collaborate to how we think about design, and the computers themselves have changed.”

The Computers Are Changing

Csanady doesn’t think that desktops or workstations no longer matter, but our conversation did reveal an apt metaphor. “I am not saying they will completely disappear,” he notes. “The question is: what type of computers will be our primary devices?” 

“We still need mainframe computers even today, but how many people go on mainframe computers to use CAD, which was not the case in the early 1980s? We believe a very similar transition is going to happen with this platform switch,” essentially saying tablets and smartphones are to personal computers what the personal computer was to the mainframe.

Shapr3D has capitalized on the tablet’s success—specifically Apple iPad Pro with its Apple Pencil. Both the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil have been required for Shapr3D. “It’s definitely a part of it,” he adds. “People actually switch completely to tablets and even mobile phones. It is not just that, but the ease of use these devices provide is incomparable to traditional desktop computers. Ease of use and user experience is actually quite foundational nowadays in how people use software.”

02 – Shapr3D for the iPad Pro has impressive capabilities and have generated a rapid professional user-based of users from all over the world. Shapr3D is the fastest growing CAD software since SolidWorks, says its CEO.

I suggest to Csanady that it was “ease of use” that empowered SketchUp’s meteoric rise to app stardom two decades ago. After SolidWork’s rapid rise, then came SketchUp. “We admire SketchUp…very great tool. Shapr3D is SketchUp on steroids because it’s a solid modeler with very similar ease of use,” he adds, “and the quality of the models is much higher. You can directly manufacturer your models and designs from Shapr3D, which is not the case with Sketchup.” 

Shapr3D — Rising Power Tool

Shapr3D began as a serious CAD tool. And it has advanced in lock-step with Apple’s iPad OS and its new capabilities, like multi-windowing. Customers also use a tethered Mac (iPad is actually tethered to the Mac) as a second monitor, but the iPad is the primary design interface. 

Customers want the larger screen on the Mac because of their specific workflows. Some Shapr3D customers are designing very large models and assemblies. “We are always blown away to see our customers building substantial things,” he says. 

To keep up with advancements, in 2020, Shapr3D introduced a new user interface called AdaptiveUI. “It is a new way to access the modeling tools that give you automatic suggestions for your next modeling operations,” he says, noting that for some customers, they are getting a 30 percent faster boost in modeling times. “We have benchmarks comparing previous versions of Shapr3D where we often see 2-3 percent increases in faster modeling, so a 30 percent increase is absolutely mind-blowing.”

Shapr3D is powered by Siemens’s Parasolid geometry modeling kernel, considered the gold standard in the MCAD world. When Siemens decided to port Parasolid to Apple’s iOS a few years ago, it took them about 6-9 months. “iOS was a harder port but not our hardest,” says Phil Nanson, Manager, Parasolid Components, Siemens PLM Software. “Most of our challenges were in testing rather than getting Parasolid to run,” he adds.

03 – Shapr3D on ARM-based Macs is the newest development for the award-winning CAD software company. Csanady is also very bullish on Apple Silicon and what Apple’s semiconductor design leadership will mean for both Apple’s mobile devices and its new ARM-based Macs.

With Parasolid on iOS, Shapr3D had one of the significant critical pieces in place so the Shapr3D development team could focus on the unique selling points of the CAD software. A big part of that is leveraging Apple’s iPad Pro and Pencil user-experience paradigm.

Of course, Apple’s chip development in its iPad Pro has also been incredible, enabling Shapr3D users to take on larger and larger models. “On the iPad Pro, Shapr3D tends to be faster for most modeling operations using Parasolid than other desktop computers. We are super happy with Parasolid,” says Csanady. He is also pleased with Apple’s progress with their iPads, particularly important given that he built his company around that platform. “In the last 10 years, they have gotten 1000x faster,” he says. “It’s stunning to think about the performance curve Apple has achieved with its silicon design teams.”

Moving to Apple Silicon Macs

When Apple introduced its chip transition to ARM-based Apple Silicon, it suddenly became apparent that iOS apps would make natural candidates for migration to macOS. 

Csanady was enthusiastic about the transition, and it meant Shapr3D would be coming to the Mac. It wasn’t just that his company got another target operating system for truly minimal effort in coding; he was excited about Apple Silicon’s potential. 

04 – Shapr3D screenshot of the introductory learning process when one launches the Mac version of Shapr3D. The award-winning software is very intuitive—just as intuitive as SketchUp—but fundamentally the application is very different because it utilizes the most powerful industrial-class modeling kernel in the world, Parasolid.

“I’m super enthusiastic,” he adds. “If you look at the performance improvements, it is something we haven’t seen for two decades. I strongly believe that this new architecture is a game-changer, especially for pro users.” 

Csanady says that what is unique about Apple’s chip designs is they are capable of so much customization carried up from silicon to their operating system technologies. This gives the company an added edge against Intel and AMD, who have lost the single-core performance crown to the new Macs’ Apple M1 chip. “The architecture in the chips allows them to build a lot of specific improvements to the core CPU efficiently that will do certain tasks 100x to 1000x faster,” he says. “CAD can benefit from this since it relies on large matrix modifications and doing lots of floating-point operations in parallel.”

But getting the Apple Silicon version of Shapr3D ready also meant that Siemens needed to port their existent Mac Parasolid kerne to Apple’s ARM architecture. Last summer, Phil Nanson told us that Siemens was receiving their Mac mini M1 test machines in the summer. We knew from Nanson that with both iOS and Intel Mac versions in hand, the port to Apple Silicon would go quickly.

Indeed, Shapr3D on Apple Silicon Macs is now here and ready to download, and the performance Csanady says is quite astonishing. “We’ve measured up to 2-3x faster CPU performance increase and a 7x performance increase compared to Intel-based devices,” he says. “It’s absolutely amazing.”

CAD Dominance for Shapr3D

The question that comes to mind is can a relatively new software company rise to CAD dominance? 

When disruptors displace incumbent market leaders, they emerge from below and outside; they don’t initially get into the same market as the incumbents they will potentially overtake. Shapr3D started on a tablet platform, so they check off this criterion for disruption. They are also on the platform with the fastest raw performance curve; nobody in the industry delivers better silicon chip advancements than Apple. And Intel, in particular, is woefully distressed at the manufacturing level—its ‘design plus manufacturing’ model is itself being disrupted. 

But putting performance advantages looming aside for just a moment, Csanady believes Shapr3D has two other key benefits. They are already on Apple’s platforms, and the incumbents they are shooting for are not. The second is Csanady believes the silicon disruption emerging today at Apple means the potential for new forms in computers. “We believe that the future of personal computers is a hybrid approach, where touch, stylus, keyboard, and mouse are all equal first-class citizens,” he says. 

If Apple does to the traditional computing market what it has done to the smartphone market—and it does so with economic compute performance advantages—Shapr3D is so far ahead on Apple’s platforms it gives them an excellent chance of upending the MCAD industry’s major incumbents. 

The post INSIDER: Shapr3D is Bold on Apple and CAD Dominance appeared first on Architosh.

In some forms of ‘generative design,’ the process begins with loading in the numerical design criteria (something developers can do). The architects or developers then respond to dozens if not more generated solutions (options really) that can be further manipulated through various software magic, allowing the architect to further fine-tune the results to a ‘Goldilocks’ ideal before shuttling the generated design off to another application—usually a BIM program.

This may be a very appealing workflow from the perspective of real estate developers and building asset managers. But architects are hardly rushing to this process. That’s not how architects want to work, says the founders at Digital Blue Foam.

All in a Name

“When we started, we thought we would be focusing on real estate developers,” says cofounder Sayjel Vijay Patel, an MIT-educated architect, and chief technology officer of Digital Blue Foam. “But it is just something about our approach—our company name is Digital Blue Foam—and we understand the design process.” Patel adds, “we generate these abstract models, and architects are really good at projecting something into a model that is abstract and seeing possibilities.”

Digital Blue Foam is web-browser based and offers users a stunning user interface that is both accessible, approachable, and engaging. (Image: Digital Blue Foam / All rights reserved.)

Patel’s double reference refers to the hot-wire cut foam models architecture and planning students learn to make in design schools, often using rigid insulation foam that is often blue. For their generative design solution, the name Digital Blue Foam connotes a deep understanding of how architects and urban planners are trained to think through design problems. “We get it, and this is something that really resonates with architects,” says Patel.

Spacemaker Acquisition

Autodesk announced its USD 240 million acquisition of Spacemaker.ai., a Nordic-based generative design software company with a similar approach to the same core problems in pre-and early-stage building design urban development.

“We were excited when we saw the Spacemaker news,” says Patel, “and it just confirms for us that we are on the right track.” In my recent conversation with Patel, he admitted that “generative design” is a trendy term within architecture today, but he fully believes it will not be a short-term trend. “There is a shift that is going to happen in the way that people are working. And it’s not just going to be one company and one solution that is going to take advantage of this new way of working.”

We are Different

There are currently multiple young software companies solely focused on generative design solutions for pre-design and early-design phase workflows. Most of them are co-led by architects in the software space. What makes Digital Blue Foam different, ultimately, may come down to philosophical orientation rather than specific software technologies. And the origins of this lie with its cofounders.

Patel says that where Digital Blue Foam may stand out the most may come down to a focus on sustainable design. The United Nations has set a hard 2030 target to curb global CO2 emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change. Building construction and operations are responsible for approximately 40-42 percent of total CO2.

“Ultimately, our goal is to build a digital software platform that unites designers, software, and data to accelerate carbon-negative building design, construction, and operations,” says Patel. “We have obsessively designed our UX in Digital Blue Foam to make it easy for architects and urban planners to design sustainable buildings in a few clicks.”

“Digital Blue Foam arose from a desire to rethink workflows in design and architecture,” says Patel. Camiel Weijenberg is the other co-founder and has his own architecture practice in Singapore. Patel says that Weijenberg found it challenging to compete with larger firms to get certain projects, citing the inefficient, traditional processes when responding to proposals and the amount of time needed to turn around concepts.

Summarizing their partnership as a “perfect collaboration,” Digital Blue Foam operated in near stealth mode for nearly three years. “On the one hand, we are very pragmatic, and then from my perspective, I am really pushing on the innovation in terms of design tools, not just from the question of ‘how do we use algorithms’ but what are the user interface and user interaction? How do we make that seamless, and how do we make this a new way of working?”

Beginnings and Agile

The company got its start by developing a generative design solution that Weijenberg’s architecture firm could utilize, and then they started reaching out to other potential customers. They would advance the solution based on feedback and then pitch the refined solution to more firms.

Digital Blue Foam has a Live Sync to GRAPHISOFT’s Archicad and recently has added a Live Sync to Autodesk Revit. Shown above is a synchronization with Archicad. (Image: Digital Blue Foam / All rights reserved.)

“It took us about 2-3 years before we got our first real customer,” he admits. The co-founders were actually not working on Digital Blue Foam full time during their stealth years. Today their team of 15 is scattered around the globe in 8 countries and 4 continents with Weijenberg in Singapore.

It was back at BIMCON in Las Vegas in 2019 that I first saw Digital Blue Foam demonstrated. However, since then, Digital Blue Foam has advanced tremendously in the past two years. There have been more than 3000 signups or trials of the demo software. Their current users are in over 50 countries, with significant users in the United States, Canada, South America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, including places like Russia.

Then there is Japan and Korea. “We have a larger enterprise project with Takenaka, which is a major AEC company in Japan, and Space Factory-GG, a Korean company focusing on mass customized residential housing,” says Patel. “So since we launched our collaboration, we have met with their team every week. We present new features, and they give us feedback. We meet with a large group of architects and get additional feedback.” Patel says the company is fully vested in a classic agile development approach to product development. “It is not like we are shooting in the dark,” he adds, “everything we come up with is validated whether it is suitable for the way they work.”

“You would be surprised; a lot of their challenges are not just generative design,” he says, ” but all of the other things around it that make it useful.” Additionally, Digital Blue Foam just formed another collaboration with a large user, the University of Budapest, where a class is being taught based around Digital Blue Foam’s platform. “They are using this in their master’s program in city planning,” adds Patel. “The professors and students see huge potential for the use of technology like this.”

The young software company just opened up an Early Access subscription program. For an individual professional, the Early Access subscription enables architects and planners to test drive Digital Blue Foam for USD 88.00 per month.  The company also provides a Teams subscription offering. Enterprises get exclusive features, and the company focused on large enterprises initially as part of a sustainable business model. For example, the push for Live Sync to Archicad came from Takenaka.

Digital Blue Foam

Digital Blue Foam (DBF) is a cloud-based solution that works with a downloaded app, an option to allow a live-streamed connection to Graphisoft’s Archicad and Autodesk Revit. You work entirely through the web browser.

An image of Digital Blue Foam and its Windrose features. Sustainability is the third component of its triad of main features or unique selling point (USP) features.  (Image: Digital Blue Foam / All rights reserved.)

Digital Blue Foam has a triad of main features. The first key feature is the Play Button, which generates designs based on inputted criteria. However, one can import a 3D mesh model that forms the limits of the development envelope. The second main feature is the Pen Tool, which differentiates Digital Blue Foam from other similar tools. “You can sketch over the plan, and those sketches will influence what is generated next,” says Patel. “This is how you can get curved shapes—we call it ‘Augmented Intelligence,’ ”

To complete the triad, the third area of the main features focuses on sustainability. It contains a suite of functions, including sun and shadow studies, a heatmap for sunlight averages, and wind-rose data pulled from ten thousand weather stations worldwide.  Digital Blue Foam features a small array of data model interoperability, including STL, OBJ, and DXF files. “We are currently working on Rhino and Grasshopper as an additional Live Sync option,” he adds.

Digital Blue Foam has a Live Sync to Graphisoft’s Archicad and more recently, a connection to  Autodesk’s Revit. Patel admits they do get asked about Revit more and more and believes this new connection will be a big hit.

You may be wondering, what about that large Japanese enterprise customer? Well, Takenaka is a key enterprise customer of Graphisoft and is using Archicad, apparently predominantly.

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a role in generative functions, taking various criteria and using them to generate solutions that meet multiple criteria like FAR or maximum lot coverage ratios and similar kinds of common design challenges for architects.

An Augmented Approach

What Digital Blue Foam is fostering an environment that concentrates on loading in lots of various data like wind, and other kinds of criteria that other solutions, including Spacemaker, are already providing. So far this year, they have established academic collaborations with top researchers from institutions such as Harvard, University of Bern in Switzerland, the University of Belfast, and the National University of Singapore, to focus on different aspects of sustainable design. Patel says that real estate developers are also a tiny percentage of new or potential new users. Still, their solution is much more focused on an augmented approach that encourages the human architect’s engagement in the process via their Pen Tool.

Building blocks can be split (see SplitXY button) and then each separate entity can be assigned a Program category like “Residential” with color-coding and automated area calculations. Furthermore, each split block can be manipulated for setbacks and overhangs allowing some basic modeling manipulation. (Image: Digital Blue Foam / All rights reserved.)

“I studied architecture and then went to MIT for my masters, where I took a lot of classes in urban planning and computer science,” he adds. “But not everyone wants to be a computational designer. And we didn’t want to create a tool that less than one percent of architects can use.”

The Pen Tool features get typical architects engaged in the generative design process, augmenting their intrinsic abilities to see possibilities in 3D models without bogging them down in complex computational criteria.

What may set Digital Blue Foam apart from rival’s tools is this ability to use its Pencil Tool to sketch over solutions and have the system intelligently respond to the input and regenerate its solver algorithm and create new solutions. In this way, the AI and the architect are collaborators in the design process and entwined into a new type of iterative workflow. From this vantage point, architects and planners may find Digital Blue Foam their ideal generative design partner. 

The post INSIDER: Augmented Intelligence: Digital Blue Foam’s Alternative Approach to Generative Design in Architecture appeared first on Architosh.

The Layer app was first introduced to Architosh at the AIA National Conference in 2019, where we awarded the new app—introduced in a session rather than an exhibit booth—an Architosh AIA BEST of SHOW honor in the Mobile+Cloud+Web category.

Architect Zach Soflin, AIA, discussed how when rehabilitating the historic Nebraska State Capitol, designed by architect Bertram Goodhue, the task of just surveying the iconic building was beyond any modern software tools (at least if done efficiently). With 1,300 rooms, 1,200 windows, and 57 data points per room, Soflin and his team realized they needed to develop a custom solution built for such a daunting task. So they did.

Three plus years later, Layer is an independent software company with a near-peerless application in the AEC industry. So what is Layer, and what does it do?

Firstly, Layer (the app) is oriented at creating a “single source of truth” for AEC projects in design, construction, or post-occupancy stages. But it doesn’t think of itself—at least not yet—as a competing CDE (common data environment) application in the form of, say, Aconex, BIM 360, or a system like Trimble Connect or Bentley ProjectWise. And that’s because Layer is fundamentally more flexible and open to serving varied data-centric needs. (Image 01)

01 – From the beginning Architosh was impressed with Layer for its mobile+cloud first development approach and powerfully flexible approach to data management for AECOM workflows, enabling various professionals to develop custom approaches to how they manage project and building data. (click on images to enlarge)

It is also coded differently than nearly all of those systems just mentioned. Unlike Autodesk or Trimble’s CDEs, for example, Layer has just one single code base (excepting its Revit add-on code) designed for the cloud through modern Web standards. As such, that simplified single code base can target both iOS and Android operating systems and modern web browsers on any computer operating system.

While Layer distinguishes itself by doing many things, it initially focused on capturing building survey information, room by room, and excels at this particular workflow. It also excels at FF&E workflows and property and asset management workflows. Since Layer connects to Revit and includes a Revit add-on function, Layer can be used for BIM coordination workflows, by itself or alongside other tools. (Image 02) Finally, Layer can function as a robust team communication system with commenting and task assignments. 

02 – Layer from the beginning featured a Revit Add-On that allows the Revit BIM user to directly connect to Layer’s functionality, powering the user to attach data to Rooms, element by element, including existing conditions data useful for BIM to FM workflows.

The reason why Layer can tackle so many divergent workflows is because of its design. While Layer ships with some Starter Templates, the main central feature of Layer is its customized Forms, using nearly two dozen flexible forms, data fields, and widgets. The software also has markup tools, photo capture tools, all with direct Revit integration. With direct links to Revit models, Layer acts much like a dashboard to Revit, with bi-directional data flow between elements in the BIM model and the data in Layer.

Revit and Data’s Varied Natures

Zach Soflin has noted that architects waste on average six hours per week looking for lost information. Losing 15 percent of one’s workweek looking for information generally results because information about projects tends to live in too many places, and keeping track of its varied sources and locations is endlessly complicated. To combat this reality, a single source of truth for all project and building information has been an elusive “holy grail” within AEC for decades now. Layer is aimed squarely at helping solve this seemingly intractable problem—conjoining data that lives in BIM files with data that does not.

For example, data is extracted from Revit model elements (e.g., doors, windows, furniture, equipment, et cetera) based on what the end-user wants to connect in Revit. However, users can freely input data into Layer (from the field, per se) that is not extracted from model elements or connected. The data may be tied only to a Room, for example, or the data is functioning as metadata about some aspect of the project.

Soflin calls this type of data of an “intangible nature” as opposed to “tangible items” (i.e., physical items) in the BIM model or the actual project. One must assume here that there can exist tangible things that are never put into the BIM model that exists in the physical building.

Data Gymnastics — A Flexible App

In 2020 Layer introduced significant changes in the ability to sort and filter project data at the List level of the application. Essentially, what Soflin calls “layered filters and sorting functions” means that the user can create and save various types of views of data in the project. This Saved Views feature is useful for multiple reasons, including doing specific audit checks about data in the project. To allow the reader to understand this more clearly, we should go through an example. To begin with, you create a particular view and give it a new name. You then decide to make this new view a particular “type” such as Gallery View, Table View, Drawing View, or Model View. We will come back to these different types in a moment. (Image 03) 

03 – In this image, we see an example of Gallery View inside Layer. Click on the image to enlarge it. On the left dark panel, you can see that this particular Gallery View was created under the Furniture Specs category which has a total of four different saved views of the data. This particular saved view of the data is called Product Gallery.

Once the type is defined, you can then set up your filters and apply them to elements of the BIM model. For instance, like filtering for all Rooms whose Ceiling Material field equals Not Empty.  “This whole new Saved View infrastructure in the app unlocks a lot of workflows that architects have,” says Soflin, noting that architects are routinely tasked with making sure that data is complete at the same level across all spaces and rooms inside a building. Layer can function to ensure information isn’t missing, and it can do this in an automated way saving architects hours of painstaking manual checking.

Similarly, using this same filtering infrastructure in Layer, the user can set up Punch List type custom views. Soflin notes, “we have various categories to show us the issues—we have open issues, in-progress issues, closed issues, and all of these enter and leave the various filter views as their data changes.”

04 – Layer is ideal for Punch Lists. The app on mobile devices streamlines taking photos of issues and generating Punch List issue items. Back in the office (as soon as the item has been added in the field) an architect could begin to see the new Punch List item and begin addressing it.

The filtering and sorting infrastructure are fully configurable, allowing the end-user to essentially design Layer to function how the user wants Layer to work. “The Punch List issues can have a filter for anything,” he says. “One can create a certain kind of view based on a particular status which itself is fully customizable,” says Soflin. For example, one can filter Punch List issues based on whether a building component must be ordered. How the user decides to shape how the application functions is entirely wide open with respect to how data can be filtered, sorted, and viewed. (Image 04)

Speaking about this last point and getting back to “types” of views, a Drawing View is when data in Layer is overlaid on a plan or elevation (really a PDF uploaded into the system). (Image 05)  Layer works with both the model views and drawing document views of Revit. It also allows you to freely upload PDF plans, elevations, sections, or any drawing document in PDF format. With this feature, you essentially can link an issue to a marker on a drawing you have uploaded into the system. Layer gives the user options for what that marker graphic looks like—a dot, rectangle, bubble cloud, et cetera. In the case of, say, working on a punch list, the user places the marker on a drawing sheet and links it to a new or existing punch list issue. You can also upload images into the punch list issue, and when working with Layer on your iPhone, the upload feature instigates the camera on your device. This makes Layer an effective punch list tool for general contractors and architects alike.

05 – Layer allows users to upload PDF sheets to the app and perform markup on them, linking data inside Layer to the various markups per sheet.

The Drawing View can be downloaded and sent to other parties, and it embeds the attached issue markers graphically, and they become hot URL links that will take you directly to the issue inside the Layer app. Soflin says, “so if I’m in Bluebeam and I’m doing additional markups on the PDF, I can click on the hotlink, and it will launch Layer and take you to that additional information on that issue.” In this way, Layer can function as a common data environment (CDE) and be used to load PDF documents with critical tie-backs to data inside Layer while distributing PDFs into workflows that involve other PDF consumption and markup tools, such as Bluebeam. (Image 05)

Not a Full CDE Yet

“Our goal is to be a full-featured CDE (common data environment),” says Soflin. “We’ve designed these ground-level tools that allow you to put together any workflow related to buildings.” Layer comes with specific templates for some workflows but not all workflows you might consider essential to a proper CDE system aimed at multi-party AECO collaboration. “We have clients using Layer for tracking submittals and things like that,” he says, “but we don’t feel we have completely fleshed out a submittals workflow, so we include no template for it. However, the fact that people are using Layer for these workflows is a testament to Layer’s inherent flexibility.”

“So yes, you could create a category for RFIs, then create views for all RFIs, views for open RFI, et cetera—create all the views you need. You can get notified when a contractor responds, all that kind of stuff,” he says. Layer’s flexibility is what is allowing it to tackle AEC industry CDE app functions.

In many ways encountering Layer in the AEC field in 2021 feels similar to discovering FileMaker Pro in the late 1990s or early 2000s. For those who don’t recall, FileMaker at that time was this fantastic workgroup relational database that afforded the AEC user with remarkable flexibility and power, but the user was incredibly free to generate whatever types of database applications they could imagine. The enticement was so strong that some architects became Filemaker developers full time, creating all manner of solutions for the AEC market.

While Layer may evoke the magical feeling of FileMaker back in the day, Layer aims at fundamentally different things. It is not a relational database development environment—it is a purpose-built application for the building industry with flexible data input design given the power of its custom forms capacities. These features are why it can evoke the sense of a custom database app (a la FileMaker) and why the Layer team says on their website, “create your own super tool for Revit.”

next page: Model View and Connections—BIM and Beyond

The post INSIDER: Beyond the CDE — Layer App and its Remarkable Fluid Power appeared first on Architosh.

This feature provides a deeper version of content on emerging technologies, with more analysis on curated news and more product news by (emTech) companies. It is exclusive to annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature titled, “The M1 Mac mini vs iMac Pro vs Everyone.”

The Apple M1 chip is an inflection point in the computer industry, marking a third and hopefully final chip transition in Apple’s Mac platform history. 

IT WASN’T THAT LONG AGO THAT AMD stole Intel’s single-core performance crown with its Zen 3 chip architecture in the new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. Now, less than a year later, Apple has come out with a chip (M1) that delivers a stunning performance of its own, and at least by one benchmark is the new reigning single-core performance champion.

But just how powerful is the M1 as compared to rival hardware options out there? And how well might this chip perform in CAD and 3D application environments? These were the questions I sought to answer ever since Architosh obtained a new (late 2020) Mac mini with an M1 processor.

I already knew Apple Silicon was a possible game-changer. And I had heard stunning praise from CAD industry software developers. But could a sub-1000 dollar machine really be a serviceable CAD/3D machine for professionals? After many benchmarks and real-world app tests (under Rosetta 2.0 no less), the short answer is “yes!”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #24 You can subscribe to Xpresso here; it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Renewed Efforts for a Universal BIM Standard Is a story over at Architect magazine that discusses the technical and non-technical challenges that must be overcome to reach a true OpenBIM standard in the US.    (Architect Magazine)

What’s essential in this story?   AIA data says that BIM software has increased significantly since 2005, with all respondents in over 50-sized firms saying they use BIM software in some capacity. However, with the increased adoption comes more pressures for universal standards, benchmarks, and file format interoperability in any BIM compatible software. This is a good read that covers all the bases.

2 – Op-ed: Tackling Biden’s climate challenge with artificial (and human) intelligence. Yale’s Phil Bernstein and others take on what it would take and mean to hit US President Joe Biden’s call for “zero net energy buildings at zero net cost.”   (Architects Newspaper)

Some highlights  Designing such zero net energy buildings at costs that reflect building conventionally will be a massive challenge, but the authors warn that we shouldn’t forget about making positive contributions to architecture and care deeply about the impact of architecture on neighborhoods and the urban fabric. The authors posit that AI may be the key to meeting this challenge—beautiful zero net energy buildings at zero net cost.

3 – 3D-printed home on Long Island hits the market at USD 300,000. Today the news broke across the Internet on this first 3D-printed home on Long Island’s North Shore that hit the market for USD 300.000.  (Architects Newspaper)

First 3D-printed house in America to receive a certificate of occupancy and hit the open real estate market. (Image: SQ4D)

What is essential in this story?  Just an hour east of the US’s first post-WWII mass-produced suburb, a new experiment in housing is taking place. A three-bedroom home with two full baths and a spacious open plan hit the market. The concrete house was 3D printed using patent-pending technology from Long Island-based SQ4D and their Autonomous Robotic Construction System (ARCS). The house is the first of its kind in the US to obtain a certificate of occupancy.

In other related news, L&T Construction made India’s first 3D printed two-story building. And this story here discusses why 3D printing in construction is one of the fastest-growing segments in the construction industry.

4 – Boston Dynamics introduces new Spot Robot products. The robot dog is clearly a hit and recently we shared that it was now living with Foster & Partners working in the field as a good little robot.  (Equipment Journal)

What is new?   Boston Dynamics is now offering Spot Enterprise, Scout, and Spot Arm. These new products add value and abilities to the robot dog. Spot Enterprise is a new version of Spot with greater capabilities. Scout is a web-based software that enables control of a fleet of Spots. Spot Arm enables users to act on data insights.  

5 – Xerox Takes on Supply Chain Complexity and Fragility with Metal 3D Printing. This manufacturing story at Forbes discusses how Xerox has entered the 3D additive manufacturing industry with new 3D metal printers, addressing both complex changes afoot in manufacturing, including new supply chain pressures brought about by the global pandemic.  (Forbes)

The Xerox ElemX 3D printer. (Image: Xerox)

Big Picture?  Xerox is following HP’s lead in 3D printing. Here we have two conventional 2D printing giants entering the 3D printing industry very late but acquiring smaller companies already in the space. 

6 –  What is a Construction Control Room and Why Do You Need One?  This blog post from Buildots talks about looking at the construction control and monitoring process similar to a mission control room at NASA.   (Buildots)

Relevancy? — The construction industry has been plagued with zero to slight productivity gains since the onset of the ICT (information communications technologies) revolution, compared to the gains made in almost all other industries. The low rate of “digitization” is largely to blame. Simply put, while the rest of the world’s industries have learned how to benefit from the innovations of the ICT revolution, construction has lagged in its understanding of how to tap digital tools for improving its economic outcomes. 

Economists characterize each successive industrial revolution (or techno-economic paradigm) shift as being driven by a primary invention. The invention’s influence extends from its dramatically wide ability to impact and benefit nearly every industrial and even non-industrial activity. Another term attributed to the key invention of an industrial revolution cycle advancement is “key factor” or sometimes called by economists “core input.” Economists Chris Freeman writes that all key factors of each techno-economic paradigm shift fulfill three conditions and we can look at those conditions in relation to construction in a moment. They are:

(1) Clearly perceived low and rapidly falling relative cost.

(2) Apparently, almost unlimited availability of supply over long periods

(3) Clear potential for the use or incorporation of the key factor or factors in many products. 

For the ICT era, the key factor is the computer chip (as invented by Intel), measured in industrial economic terms as “operations per cost” (operations per thousand US dollars, for example). A second internal key factor in ICT is the “data transmission size per second” (over the Internet, for example). In the case of the invention of the Internet, the first key factor (microprocessors) is a significant driver of performance advancement of the secondary key factor (Internet speed performance). 

It has been noted by economists studying industrial-economic revolutions that small changes on the relative input cost structure have very little effect on the behaviors of engineers, designers, and researchers. Only big and persistent changes have the power to transform the operational common sense procedures within industries. (see: Architosh, “Synergy and Alignment — APIs Democratizing Role,” 3 Oct 2020)

As we stated in the article just referenced, “this means that innovations that seem to speak to new modes of procedural structure in industrial processes but don’t generate rapidly falling relative costs will not yield take-up and re-organization.”  Thus, all digitization has meant to the field of construction since the advent of the computer is that it is perceived to have very little chance to generate rapidly falling relative costs. But this is now starting to change as emerging technologies like drones, laser scanners, 3D cameras, AR, and digital design and fabrication (DDaF) process models. 

BUILDOT’s solution is 360-degree cameras mounted on hardhats. The video data is converted into a digital twin model that is compared against a BIM model by AI to measure progress and safety issues.

Buildots blog post makes the point that “control room” while commonly associated with NASA actually has its roots in manufacturing. The idea is a room that provides a centralized view of automated processes with continue tracking and measuring of progress. As they state, “one of the main challenges on a construction project includes accessing all of the data from the site and being able to structure it in such a way to get meaningful insights that can be analyzed and actioned accordingly.” Usually, the loss of construction productivity takes place through poor planning when a sub-contractor should arrive but is late and a stage in the work waits for that sub to arrive to do the work, or when a sub-contractor is working at a slower than usual pace and the general contractor is unaware that they are behind schedule.

Buildots solution is aimed at solving that last issue, with hardhat mounted 360-degree cameras. The data is used to create a digital twin 3D model that is compared to a BIM model obviously developed to a high LOD. AI algorithms are then used to automatically generate reports via a comparison between the two models. 

An image of the BUILDOT software system.

One way of looking at this specific technology is to compare it to how it relates to the “key factor(s)” for the current ICT era. Does this process benefit from “operations per cost” in microprocessors? Does this process benefit from advancements in “data transmission size per second”? Or do the three conditions for a key factor actually apply to a new invention, a new “core input”? It is possible the answer is yes, yes, and yes. 

For example, forward-looking falling costs in chips means that chips may be embedded in the camera-helmets in the near future. Paired with a smart device, insights might be processed in near real-time while walking around the job site, not just later in a control room. A real-time insight would enable a job super to make an instruction to a sub-contractor on the spot. This happens today without the use of any technology when experienced supers identify issues while walking the construction site. But only if the super can spot the issue. This is where “granularity” comes into play. And that is where AI algorithms can play an outsized role. 

7 –  The Architect of Modern Algorithms —  Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.  (Quanta)

What’s fascinating about this story?  — Likely, like me, you have never heard of Liskov, a 2008 Turing Award winner and a member of the team at MIT that created the first programming language that did not rely on “goto” statements. That programming language was CLU, short for “cluster,” and relied on an approach she invented called “data abstraction.” Every modern language today descends from that model of data abstraction. 

This article has a lot of interesting takeaways. Liskov says at one point that AI is an application, not a core discipline. But the larger importance of this story is the stunning info on how male-dominated fields like mathematics and computer science actually were (or perhaps are?) back in her time, back in the early ’70s and 80s. Liskov would eventually head the computer science department at MIT, but when she started teaching there the ratio was about 10:1000 in favor of men. 

8 –  Chipmaking is being redesigned. Effects will be far-reaching. — The chipmaking industry is booming. The capitalization of the world’s listed semiconductor firms now exceeds 4 trillion USD, 4x over what they were worth just five years ago.  (Economist)

So what’s the problem, sounds good to me?  But in actuality, while chip designs are become more diverse and more specialized, while also general purposes chips are being reduced in size and power requirements to be placed in every “manner of device” in the IoT (Internet of Things) era, at the opposite side of the chip ecosystem are the reduced number of firms that are capable of actually manufacturing ever-increasingly small and specialized chips. In fact, just three firms are able to manufacture advanced chips: Intel, TSMC, and Samsung. The problem is, 80 percent of that manufacturing capability is now in Asia. 

And then there are the design side changes. It seems gone are the days when folks got their chips from folks like Intel, IBM, and AMD. Now, software companies are designing chips of their own, including Amazon, Google, Apple, and now soon Microsoft. And then there is a wealth of startups like Cerebras (American)—we talked about them in issue #23 last month—Graphcore (British), and others like Nuvia, which we discuss in our special feature in Xpresso #24. This last company is being acquired by chipmaker Qualcomm. 

9 –  A new Hub for Danish Robot Developers —  3XN—which is an architecture firm with an advanced research laboratory component called GXN—has designed a new joint home for Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) in Odense, Denmark.  (BD+C)

The skinny and importance?  The new facility will house most of both organization’s activities, creating the world’s largest hub for cobots (collaborative robots that work and interact with humans). 

10 –  Exploring the use of artificial intelligence in architecture —   This article talks about research at the University of Michigan exploring the use of AI to create new architectural designs.   (Tech Xplore)

The interesting and novel. — Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger, two of the researchers first got involved with AI in architecture prior to 2006, where they worked with Dr. Author Flexer at the Austrian Institute of Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and held the first course in machine learning for architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, in 2006. 

“Our past papers, including ‘A Question of Style’, ‘Imaginary Maps’ , and ‘Machine Hallucinations’ form the backbone of our recent study,” del Campo said. “The main objective of all these works was to open AI for architecture applications and there are several opportunities to do so. They cover an area that reaches from solutions for optimization problems to novel territories for the interrogation of philosophical questions such as aspects of agency, authorship, and sensibility. In our opinion, this is the very first genuinely 21st-century design technique.”

One dramatic outcome of their research was this. “We realized that there is something the human brain can do that AIs cannot do so well yet: recognize the potential of turning an error into a creative solution.” The two researchers are working on two books on AI in architecture, to be published in 2021 and 2022. “The first book discusses the theoretical implications of using AI to produce architectural designs, touching on aspects such as agency, authorship, and design in a post-human/automated world. The second book, on the other hand, outlines the technical aspects associated with the use of AI in architecture.”

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

Apple Entering the VR-AR Headset Market – The New!

A lot of folks have been waiting for this news for a long time. You see, Apple’s Macs have poor VR headset support, and it’s just unacceptable.

Dan Riccio Stepped Down to Focus on AR/VR

Over at Ars Technica, they are covering a story today about Apple’s hardware chief stepping down to take-over full-time leadership on Apple’s long-rumored VR/AR headset.

Last month Apple announced hardware chief Dan Riccio would be stepping down to focus full-time on a special project. But Apple didn’t mention what that product was. Now a report from Silicon Valley publication The Information has revealed what is really going on. (Image: Apple)

Apparently, the VR headset hit a snag under current project leader Mike Rockwell. Rockwell will stay in place but report to Riccio, who will be the top point person in charge. Apple reportedly has over 1,000 engineers focused on this new VR/AR headset device.

A few days ago, The Verge reported that Apple’s rumored VR headset could cost USD 3,000. But if so, the good news is it will feature 8K displays and over a dozen cameras. The Information has a self-created drawing based on “internal Apple images of a late-stage prototype from last year,” and the design features a very lightweight fabric mesh material that helps keep it lightweight on your head, plus design cues from other Apple devices like swappable Apple Watch-style headbands and HomePod-esq mesh fabric.

The device will apparently feature power-hungry 8K displays but not everywhere. Instead, eye-tracking technology will determine where you are looking and set the 8K resolution in just that area and render peripheral areas in lower resolution—a method known as foveated rendering in the VR world. That’s a technique used by Finnish industrial-strength VR/XR-3 headset maker Varjo.

Apple’s VR headset would include some AR functionality, include LiDAR technology like Varjo’s recent advancement (the first to use LiDAR), and be powered by Apple Silicon (a chip as powerful as the M1 is likely). Apple’s patents on its VR headset include names like Avi Bar-Zeev as an inventor. He is the creator of the Microsoft Hololens. He left Apple in 2019.

Further Analysis & Commentary:  Apple’s delay in producing a VR headset has never made any sense. Macs’ absence of suitable VR capabilities has been a serious drag on Mac adoption in not just gaming but pro markets like Architecture. While this estimated price is steep, it is similar to Varjo’s professionally-oriented headset, a device that has found a very successful market in the automotive and aerospace simulation industries.

A best-of-breed VR device from Apple that provided unique capabilities on the macOS platform would more than make-up for Apple’s truancy with virtual reality hardware. I guess that this new VR device will arrive simultaneously with the new Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro machines, possibly in Q4-2021.

Tech Soft 3D on Apple, Plus M1

Tech Soft 3D is getting ready for Apple’s macOS transitions, including the deprecation of OpenGL and preferential move to Apple Metal, plus Apple Silicon support.

Tech Soft 3D CTO Gavin Bridgeman said that the company is advancing on both fronts quickly to support developer partners. Moving to support Metal has been relatively smooth thus far, he says. “We already have an abstraction layer in there, so we just need to build and finish our Metal driver, our OpenGL driver, and our DirectX driver, and our tools will look at the system and determine which should be used,” he says.

Erik Hultgren, product manager at Tech Soft 3D, added, “so even though Windows is our dominant platform—and we are starting to see that for a lot of developers their multiplatform strategy is around using the Web—we do have enough users on the Mac that when Apple switched to Metal we wanted to lead there.” He adds, “so we are serious about getting Metal done because some of our biggest partners are on Apple iOS and macOS platforms.”

Bridgeman and Hultgren said that Tech Soft 3D now has a fully dedicated team working on updating their toolkits for Apple Silicon and Metal. “They are doing nothing but building out that dedicated macOS driver,” adds Hultgren. He says there are actually two teams, one in France and one in America, working on it.”

SolidWorks was the one company anxious to get Tech Soft 3D going on support for Apple Silicon. It wasn’t SolidWorks, however, but eDrawings, the CAD tool that is supported on many different platforms that generated high interest from the MCAD giant.

Familiar with ARM Platform

“We have done work with our toolkits for supporting ARM on the Hololens, so we have done work on ARM already,” says Hultgren. The Microsoft Hololens 2 is run by an ARM processor. Previously it was an X86 processor but today runs on an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 chip based on the ARM cortex technology.

The beauty of Tech Soft 3D and their toolkits is they isolate their partners from feeling the brunt of these OS changes. “They don’t have to change a line of code,” says Hultgren. “We give them the libraries, and they are up and running!”

The M1 support is in beta now out at partners, but the official release will likely be timed with their mid-summer product update.

BIM News

ArchDaily has a good story about the Quebec Wood Export Bureau and their new free BIM plugin on Revit.

A view of the Offsite Wood plugin app running inside Autodesk Revit. (Image: QWEB)

The app is called Offsite Wood and helps architects select product families that have the right dimensions, fire resistance, and sustainability profile to meet their needs.

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

We have recently spoken to The Wild founder and CEO, Gabe Paez about his company’s latest features and how the global pandemic has impacted AEC creatives and driven up interest in VR technologies like his company’s innovative The Wild platform.

The Wild has a new feature called Tours. And it came during the pandemic with great aid to AEC pros using The Wild’s VR collaboration platform. (Image: The Wild / Architosh)

The Tours features enable users to craft a story that will focus everyone around a user’s desired framing. But there is so much more going on at The Wild and great perspectives from Paez about the future of this kind of technology. Don’t miss next month’s issue.

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #25 in March.

Closing Notes

Another item on my mind is explaining to you all that the Xpresso Index and Glossary are still on the horizon. It has been moved back to Q1, 2021 to align with other Architosh site development updates.

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #24 appeared first on Architosh.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature titled, “2021 Tech Trends — CAD/3D Industry Executives Share Thoughts.”

We look at technology trends in CAD and 3D industries from the vantage point of long-arc trends and the impact of the pandemic context. 

IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD, WHAT TECH TRENDS will have emerged, accelerated, or changed for us all in the years ahead? And specifically—what impacts will there be in the CAD and 3D industries?

To answer these questions, CAD and 3D industry executives share perspectives that are naturally impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Firms and individuals around the globe have had to make numerous adjustments to live-work life arrangements. Many of these changes will remain with us for years to come. Additionally, we look at long-arc tech trends and how the pandemic context has possibly impacted them. But first, five trends for 2021.

Trend 1: Mobility is Heightened

This is both the most obvious and most interesting trend with respect to the pandemic context. To get the best sense of what is happening across multiple CAD and 3D industry segments, we had the good fortune of Lenovo approaching us to discuss 2021 trends. Speaking to a world-leader in workstation computer hardware added insights we might not get from software folks.

Chris Ruffo, Worldwide Segment Manager, Architecture, Engineering, and Product Development, Lenovo, told us the pandemic had altered the mobility parameter in computing. “Mobility is going to be the new norm,” he says. “We believe this is going to continue, and many of the things that our customers learned in the past year are going to be a part of their permanent workflow.”

With professionals forced to work from home, the CAD and 3D industries faced myriad challenges—from computer power, collaboration to data storage. These three core challenges drove the importance of other trends listed below. But the initial factor facing the closures of offices was, “how do I bring my work home?”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #23. You can subscribe to Xpresso here; it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – The U.S. Capitol wasn’t designed for an insurrection, is the title of this FastCompany piece by Mark Wilson. This an excellent article that discusses the long-standing observation that the U.S. Capitol building is a security challenge. “It’s kind of easy to defend a closed installation—an army base or nuclear plant. Nobody gets in. If you get over the fence, we shoot you. But we’re talking about the place we invite the public to, and [want them to] feel welcome,”   (FastCompany)

The Capitol east front at night. (Image: Martin Falbisoner, Wikicommons)

So Washington DC was designed to be open?  Indeed, that is the case. Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed DC in the grand classical architecture style, and the gesture was aspirational. “It wasn’t meant to feel exclusive or fortress-like. The city is one big symbolic gesture to what the nation is supposed to be.”

2 – Beyond the Master Builder: How Robots Can Really Transform the Role of the Architect. Boston Dynamics construction manager Brian Ringley sees invaluable opportunities for robotics that have little to do with automating building construction and installation.  (Architecture Magazine)

A means and methods debate?  Absolutely! “This file-to-field approach, challenging even for the few vertically integrated organizations currently capable of its execution, is infeasible to implement in today’s prevailing risk-averse and siloed design-bid-build delivery model.”

3 – Week in Tech: A New Model Predicts the Impact of Climate Change on Cities. ‘University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’ researchers have completed a study on climate change that predicts the temperatures in certain urban areas will, on average, increase between 1.9C and 4.4C by the end of the century. (Architect Magazine)

What is the call to action? The full research findings are published here on Nature. The findings call for multi-modal global projections of local urban climates for climate-sensitive development and to support green infrastructure intervention as a means to reduce urban heat stress on large cities. 

4 – How robots could save one of the world’s most unusual cathedrals.  “Barcelona’s most famous landmark has all the makings of a fantastic blockbuster movie: politically savvy priests, robots, vigilante revolutionaries, the husband of the Virgin Mary, a seemingly mad but brilliant architect, vandals, desecrators, and 138 years of a still-unfolding plot.”   (CNN Style)

Closing in on the finish line. This article covers the history of Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece, The Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, Spain. It discusses architect Mark Burry’s role in the completion of the basilica and the use of computers to solve some of the toughest challenges facing its completion. The estimated construction finish for Gaudi’s masterwork is now aimed for 2026, marking the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death. 

5 –  3D Printers May Be Toxic to Humans.  In what is certainly of deep concern to advocates of this emerging technology, 3D printers may, in fact, be bad for us—or at least until we learn to protect ourselves during their use.  (Forbes)

What’s the risk? 3D printers can emit toxic particles during their operations. A study presented at the 2020 Society for Risk Analysis virtual Annual Meeting in December showed that the particles released during the printing process could affect indoor air quality and public health. The melting of plastic filaments and other similar materials tend to release volatile compounds into the air near the printer and the object. Read here to learn more. 

6 – Foster + Partners adopts Spot the Boston Dynamics robot dog.  Top global architecture firm Foster + Partners has employed the robot dog Spot by Boston Dynamics to oversee construction at Battersea Power Station in London. (Dezeen)

How are they using Spot?  Spot hold scanners on his back and he walks around the site regularly scanning the site to monitor progress. Readers are already aware Spot can walk up and downstairs and over tough terrain. The data is sent back to the office where it is used to build a “digital twin” model of the project as it is built. Spot has its own sensors but at Battersea Spot carries additional equipment. The robot can carry up to 14 kilograms of equipment. 

7 – A Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just Left a Supercomputer in the Dust.  “The history of computer chips is a thrilling tale of extreme miniaturization. The smaller, the better is a trend that’s given birth to the digital world as we know it. So, why on earth would you want to reverse course and make chips a lot bigger?” (SingularityHub)

Wafer Scale Compute by Cerebras breaks record-setting CFD (computational fluid dynamics) score, in fact, complete the task faster than real-time. In other words, this computer can tell you what is going to happen in the future. This can be used in aerospace applications, among other applications including AI.

A chip so fast it can tell what is going to happen in the future! This chip has 1.2 trillion transistors, compared to 16 billion in Apple’s new M1 chip. It is the size of an iPad. Why make such a large chip? Cerebras, its maker, is hoping for innovations in AI and simulations of the physical world. How fast is it? Housed in a CS-1 computer, the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (Cerebras WSE) executed a complex fluid dynamics simulation 200 times faster than the Joule 2.0 supercomputer. In fact, the CS-1 with the WSE chip was faster than real-time. In other words, it can tell you what is going to happen in the future. 

Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine, the world’s largest chip ever built. 56x the size of the largest GPU.

Why is it so fast?  Supercomputers are made up of many chips all tied together through data interconnects. Cerebras WSE in the CS-1 contains just one chip and essentially cuts out the commute time. The interesting implication for this work with Cerebras is the idea of making chips actually larger. The CS-1 is the size of an undercabinet refrigerator. 

8 – Robots Made of Ice Could Build and Repair Themselves on Other Planets.  Ice is all over the solar system, and exploring robots could use it as a structural material.  (IEEE)

IceBot is a proof of concept robot made of ice. (Image: GRASP Lab)

How would it work? Robots aren’t designed to self-report like in Star Wars. If their parts break they need material resources to fix them, even if they are smart enough to repair things. That’s where ice comes in, as it is everywhere on Mars, for example. 

9 – The smart city news that shaped 2020  Smart Cities Dive identified 20 stories detailing the prevalent and groundbreaking trends that influenced a year like no other.  (SmartCitiesDive)

A highlight story example:  One story is about the town or city library as a smart city hub for digital intelligence. As a source of information already, libraries are increasingly playing a role in smart city initiatives. 

10 – The future of airport design after COVID-19  The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed almost all aspects of life and facilities. Airports have especially been affected.  (Construction Specifier)

Future airport design. Big changes are potentially coming to airport design, aimed at helping to stop the pandemic from getting worse and doing the same for future pandemics. At the center of new “design changes” will be how space is used throughout the airport complex, including outside the terminal buildings. Areas where congregation happens today in airports, like at registration and ticket desks, will be eliminated and those processes will happen elsewhere, even at home using smartphones and apps to manage processes like check-in. Materials will change too to allow for new photocatalytic devices and auto-cleaning materials. And AI will be everywhere. 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

Algorithms-aided Design (AAD) News:

ComputationalDesign: NEXT 3.0 The Past, Present & Future: Two-Day online interactive conference with global frontiers with live presentations, tutorials, interactive sessions, live mentorships, and panel discussions. (ArchDaily)

This event takes place this January. The third in a series. Go here to register and learn more.

This event takes place this January. The third in a series. Go here to register and learn more.

ACADIA 2020 went huge in 2020! Due to the global pandemic, the annual ACADIA (Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture) conference went virtual and in doing so had a massive turnout! More important, perhaps, the conferences’ developments from the pandemic context may include things that can present in future ACADIA conferences. (ArchNewspaper)

New Digital Tools in a Post-Pandemic World:

Emerging Tools:  Due to the global pandemic, we have all had to make adjustments, in firms, in design and engineering schools, on the job site, in the factory, and at home. Here are some other interesting tools developments with comments.

Nvidia’s Omniverse — We have mentioned this before either on Architosh or in this newsletter. Omniverse works with Universal Scene Description (USD) files and Material Definition Language (MDL) files, both loading, creating, and managing these data sets.

Further Analysis & Commentary:  This technology enables co-collaborative creation and editing of 3D models and scenes—in other words, multiple people working towards the same end goal but as a team and using different tools that can work within the Omniverse system. Huw Roberts, CEO of GRAPHISOFT noted in comments to us for this newsletter that such innovations relate to the creativity coming out of the chaos of 2020, or at least address that chaos. Omniverse predates the global pandemic, but his point is more about how such technology can address this pandemic context quite beautifully. 

Arkio — Is a new beta-level interactive, collaborative 3D workspace. Multiple stakeholders can all interact and design together using various devices from VR headsets to mobile devices. It features push-pull modeling and integrations with Revit.

Further Analysis & Commentary:  We saw glimpses of this kind of technology in The Wild VR software at AU several years ago. Modeling with VR handsets is still quite challenging but will surely become vastly better with time. Arkio is in beta now but looks very promising. The ability to offer participation for stakeholders using different types of hardware is a big key win. It’s been possible for multiple users to meet, collaborate, and work together with VR systems for years, but what typical architectural client has a VR system? 

Conceptboard — this is a new collaborative whiteboard solution with an infinite canvas. You can add in video and numerous file formats onto the canvas. Then pointers with participant names float around as folks work on things together. It supports @mentions, records board history, versions, and edits and has robust role management with access and permissions. Used by corporate giants like Siemens, Lufthansa, Konica-Minolta, plus architecture firms like HOK, Perry Ellis International

Further Analysis & Commentary:  As noted in the Special Feature article on trends, there is a plethora of cloud-based collaborative solutions but few dovetail yet in impactful ways with AEC/BIM solutions. Conceptboard looks very interesting for 2D collaboration and “infinite canvases” are useful for conceptual-stage work. 

Modelo — is devoted to enabling multiple stakeholders to access and view 3D models on any type of device. Users can create a free account. The system supports (ingests) most common 3D formats, including SketchUp, Rhino, Revit, AutoCAD, Navisworks, and other open standards like OBJ and STL. Once your model is stored you can share a URL for access.

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

So definitely on tap for next month will some beginnings at testing and looking at the Mac mini M1 based machine Architosh now has its hands on. Last month it was still in shipment but our early impressions with general computing the M1 chip is quite fast. We are impressed with multiple aspects of Apple’s macOS on its ARM-based M1.

The new Mac mini with Apple Silicon M1 chip. (Image: Apple / Architosh)

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #24 in February.

Closing Notes

Another item on my mind is explaining to you all that the Xpresso Index and Glossary are still on the horizon. It has been moved back to Q1, 2021 to align with other Architosh site development updates.

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #23 appeared first on Architosh.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso #22 titled, “Augmented Intelligence: Digital Blue Foam’s Alternative Approach to Generative Design in Architecture.”

Digital Blue Foam may be an architects’ dream generative design partner, as the company says architects want ‘generative design’ to augment their design process, not take them over. 

DO ARCHITECTS REALLY WANT AI TO GENERATE designs from which to choose from? Digital Blue Foam, a software start-up with a growing global footprint, says the answer is “no.”

In some forms of ‘generative design,’ the process begins with loading in the numerical design criteria (something developers can actually do). The architect or developers then respond to dozens if not more generated solutions (options really) that can be further manipulated through various software wizardry, allowing the architect to further fine-tune the results to a ‘Goldilocks’ ideal before shuttling the generated design off to another application—usually a BIM program.

This may be a very appealing workflow from the perspective of real estate developers and building asset managers. But architects are hardly rushing to this process. That’s not how architects really want to work, says the founders at Digital Blue Foam.

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #22. You can subscribe to Xpresso here, it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – AI Regulatory Guidance issued by White House, The White House’s Office of Management and Budget’s AI Regulatory Guidance was released on 17 November 2020.  Executive Order 13859 “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” assumes that the USA is the global leader in AI technologies.   (The White House)

What’s the potential upside? The Executive Order has released a memorandum that outlines policies that can encourage growth in AI, principles of stewardship in AI applications while simultaneously avoiding policies that needlessly hamper innovation and growth. It states, “Where permitted by law, when deciding whether and how to regulate in an area that may affect AI applications, agencies should assess the effect of the potential regulation on AI innovation and growth.” It further stipulates that “promoting innovation and growth in AI is a high priority of the U.S. government.” 

While this is positive news for the AI industry, “regulations” are not outlined in the memorandum. Rather, risks to public trusts in AI are communicated; the U.S. government seeks to build trust in AI technologies. And it seeks to “advance American innovation” and therefore make sure “agencies should keep in mind international uses of AI, ensuring that the United States’ regulatory regime does not disadvantage American companies.”   

2 – Artificial intelligence is helping lower costs, speed up construction projects. This local news story highlights how AI technologies help construction companies save money on their projects by optimizing construction data to eliminate unneeded equipment and manpower. The story highlights a new company to my ears, ALICE Technologies, which says it can save USD 30 million on a USD 500 million project. (7News)

AI optimized construction schedules. ALICE can automatically produce 4D schedules early in the construction planning process. (Image: ALICE Technologies)

What’s the AI tool? ALICE Technologies: artificial intelligence construction engineering, is a Menlo Park, California AI construction software company founded by Rene Markos, a Standford grad with a Ph.D. in Construction Management. ALICE is a construction planning platform powered by AI. With a development office in Prague, the company seems small but growing, counting the likes of Kajima Corp and Takenaka among its heavy-hitter clients.

AI is used to produce hundreds of construction plan options in minutes, similar to how AI is being used in early-stage design AI tools like Spacemaker. (Image: ALICE Technologies)

ALICE looks like it uses generative type algorithms to game-play hundreds of scenarios in construction sequence workflows and optimizes outcomes. It also offers the analysis of costs and schedules’ impact to design changes and does much more. 

3 – Robots Invade the Construction Site This piece on Wired by Will Knight reviews multiple new robotic applications on construction sites, including a new one to our ears, Canvas, a drywall finish robot. Canvas using lidar, cheap low-cost laser scanners, and computer vision to detect the bare drywall walls and sets about finishing the drywall with a smooth plaster finish. (Wired)

Canvas is a new drywall finishing system robot that saves days on drywall finish construction work. (Image: Canvas)

What is essential in this story? This story runs through several other robot companies mentioned before on Xpresso, including Doxel, Buildots, Boston Dynamics, and its robot Spot, and others. Another aspect of this story is that Kevin Albert, co-founder, and CEO of Canvas, was previously at Boston Dynamics. So we are now seeing individuals from leading robotics companies spin out and create new startups.  An IDC report forecast robotics growth in the construction industry will be 25 percent annually through 2023. 

4 –  Architect Martin Miller: taming complexity with digital tools.  This an engaging sit-down with architect Martin Miller, assistant professor of practice in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University.  (Cornell Chronicle)

“MaoHaus” in Beijing, China, is an experimental facade that resembles a flowing fabric but is made of concrete. (Image: AntiStatics Architecture)

Any gold nuggets?  Yes! Miller is a partner in a Beijing firm called AntiStatics whose origin starts as a criticism of architecture as a fixed idea—”of existing mantras, manifestos, and ideas”… The firm is doing innovative work worth looking at like MaoHaus above in the image. 

5 – Biden is expected to spur the growth of the smart city tech market. This report says that Frost & Sullivan predict USD 2.46 trillion of business opportunities in smart cities technologies by 2025. Spending on smart city technologies is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22 percent to USD 327 billion by 2025.  (SmartcitiesDive)

The eight parameters of “smart cities” as defined by this research company. (Image: Frost & Sullivan)

Election ramifications? Frost & Sullivan define a “smart city” as embodying at least five of eight parameters. (see image above), which no city in the world has achieved as of yet. “Under a Biden administration, efforts around smart cities can be expected to accelerate,” said Archana Vidyaskekar, research director of Visionary Innovation Group at Frost & Sullivan. 

6 – 8 Smart Cities to Watch in 2020. This article, which oddly lists 8 Smart Cities to watch in 2020, while the article is from this November. Still, the article not only lists 8 interesting cities on this list but explores each city’s “smart city” efforts. (Slate Tech)

What are the 8 Smart Cities to Watch? Aurora, IL, Coral Gables, FL, Colorado Springs, CO, Houston, TX, Jacksonville, FL, Philadelphia, PA, Reno, NV, and Syracuse, NY. It is very interesting to see that not a single “superstar city” is on this list.  So some of the interesting things these 8 smart cities to watch include installing smarter infrastructure at roads, bridges, and traffic lights; installing sensors that provide data on pavement temperatures, AI with video data for public safety, EV readiness programs, carbon to EV conversion for city vehicles, smart street lights to reduce energy, resilient plan-to-smart city alignment efforts, wifi on city buses and trains, flood sensors and more. 

7 – How The Global Pandemic Became an Inflection Point for Drones.  “It’s too early to tell if the pandemic and its impact on in-person business will be the shot in the arm to propel the commercial drone market forward, but companies around the world are rushing to put forth drones that can serve numerous enterprise applications in multiple industries, including construction, agriculture, inspection and food and medicine delivery.” (Forbes)

The Key Takeaways. Global shipments for UAVs for the enterprise alone will reach 2.4 million by 2023, increasing at a 66.8 percent annual growth rate. That’s a healthy growth rate. Amazon missed its estimated 2018 date for Amazon delivery by drone but this past August the company was granted federal approval for its fleet of Prime Air delivery drones. 

DroneDeploy is a leader in the drone market covering many industries besides AEC. Mining, Solar, Agriculture, Oil & Gas.

Food delivery (Uber with McDonald’s), Medical delivery (Zipline), and a host of other industrial sectors are all testing up drone deployment. Readers of Xpresso already know about AEC and infrastructure uses for Drones. Think Doxel and DroneDeploy for example. 

8 – Rumors: Is AMD working on an ARM-based M1 Rival?  “Apple has shaken up the processor industry with the arrival of its M1-powered Macs, offering excellent performance despite being a low-power chip. But could another ARM-based competitor be on its way?” writes Rob Thubron (TechSpot).

Will AMD Enter the ARM Chip Market?  A new rumor says AMD will lift the lid on its own version of an SoC (System on a Chip) processor, to rival Apple’s M1. The rumor is interesting because it says AMD will introduce two versions of its secrete ARM chip, one with integrated RAM (the Apple M1 has integrated memory) and one without. 

Why this will be important. An AMD ARM-based processor could be a safe hedge for the company, though its own Ryzen X86 compliant microarchitecture has won accolades since its introduction with the company delivering highly competitive processors, which TSMC delivers on a 7nm process with the best products. Delivering an ARM chip could help AMD be perceived as being on the bleeding edge of chip developments, as well as positioning itself well for lower-power chip applications, from efficient ARM-based server applications to edge devices and mobiles. A December Steam Survey shows AMD with 26.91 percent of the CPU market. 

9 – Huawei’s 24-core 7nm Kunpeng CPU Allegedly Beats Intel Core i9-9900K.  One of the more interesting developments in computing these days is the disruption in the microprocessor field. On the one hand, we have Apple’s disruption and ARM’s disruption, both playing out. Another disruption is happening in China with Huawei. (Tom’s Hardware)

Huawei’s new Desktop PC line up features new and powerful Chinese-made processors based on the ARM architecture. This another index of the rise of ARM architecture and the fall of Intel’s X86 architecture.

The big takeaway? Smartphone maker Huawei Technologies, a company in the general news over US-China relations issues (see: US State Department, “The United States Further Restricts Huawei Access to US Technology,” 17 August 2020) has launched a new brand of desktop PCs, earlier this year back in the late summer. These machines will not use Intel or AMD processors or X86 architecture chips at all, but rather ARM-based processors known as Kunpeng 920, based on ARM’s Neoverse N1 (codename Ares) microarchitecture. The new PC line is striking looking and reminiscent of IBM and Lenovo design language but with a more industrial edge to it. 

Kunpeng 920 is a 7nm chip that boasts 24-64 cores that run between 2.4 – 3 GHz. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was at first producing the chip but cut off ties with Huawei due to new US regulations. The article describes more of the machine’s details, including that it doesn’t run Windows either but rather China’s homemade operating system known as Unified Operating System (UOS) a customized Linux variant that works with ARM. 

Obviously, “allegedly beats” a very fast Intel chip is just a claim. Part of the issue of testing these machines and this processor is the compatibility issue with its OS with the regular applications and test suites that are common in the West. Huawei Technologies has also placed the Kunpeng 920 processor inside its Atlas 800 server, in fact, two of them. Russian News Agency has a good story on how Atlas servers with Kunpeng 920 chips are saving lives using AI applications and the Atlas 3001 AI Inference card. 

10 – A 3D Printed Apartment Building is Going Up in Germany.  The ambitions of large 3D printers in the building industry continues unabated. Now a 4,090 square foot building in Wallenhausen, Germany, is being printed. The building is going to be three-stories.  (SingularityHub)

Whose has this tech? The project is a joint-venture between COBOD, a Danish firm making large modular 3D printers for the construction company, and a German supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems. COBOD is also now going to be printing the bases of 650-foot tall GE wind turbines. Back to the German 3D printed building, it will be built of a specially developed cement mixture created by HeidelbergCement for 3D printing.  

The Danish company COBOD makes the BOD2 gantry system based construction 3D printer with an interchangeable nozzle system. It can be mounted to the foundation of a building or movable concrete pillars. (Image: COBOD / All rights reserved.)

The BOD2 is the company’s second-generation construction printer. It is modular and companies who buy it can select the modular size they need. The MOD2 is 3x faster than the BOD, with an 18 meter per minute print speed. These systems that work on large suspended rail-beams hover over construction sites and lay-down concrete and other materials. In the case of their future partnership with GE, COBOD will 3D printing the bases of even larger GE wind turbines, enabling them to reach higher heights which exposes them to stronger winds. When wind turbines were introduced in the 80s the first generation onshore turbines (20 meters tall) generated a maximum output of 100kW per turbine. By 2017, onshore wind turbines reached 84 meters tall and could output 2MW (2000kW). 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

generative design: A Preview of our Spacemaker.ai Talk

Spacemaker.ai is a Norwegian AEC software startup that was recently acquired by Autodesk for USD 240 million in net cash. We have written about the news originally here, then with additional info and insights from Amy Bunzel, Senior Vice President, Autodesk.

Bunzel provided good information not discussed in the news release but I wanted to get deeper on Spacemaker, thus the recent follow-up with them. What follows are some notes from that conversation, while we work on a major Spacemaker feature article coming up. They are pertinent to our Digital Blue Foam feature above and it is interesting to compare both companies. For example, both companies are architect-led and both started with existent problems in architecture practice. This is how Havard Haukeland, the architect, described what led to the founding of Spacemaker.ai.

“I was basically working with the kind of projects that users are using Spacemaker [for] today,” he said, “the early-phase projects, both before users have acquired a site and the years after they have acquired a site, to really find out what to build on the site.”

An image of Spacemaker.ai, showing generated options on the left panel, the main viewport window, and the data palette on the right side. (Image: Spacemaker.ai)

Haukeland told me on our call he was really frustrated that he was not able to deliver what clients really wanted. This was the same message about frustration communicated by Patel about Digital Blue Foam’s practicing architect co-founder, Camiel Weijenberg. So both of these similar companies emerged for a specific set of ‘pain-points’ in architecture practice and the formation of their solutions naturally resemble each other because they both are built upon and reference foundational technologies in the overall constellation of emerging technologies (emTech) in AEC. Namely, machine learning, algorithms-aided design (AAD), or computational design—methods that use algorithms to model based on numerical inputs rather than explicit modeling under the human hand of the computer mouse.

Both companies also arose to address fundamental economic issues. The incremental innovation improvements of traditional modeling, BIM, and CAD tools and the associated design practices (methods of architectural production) are unable to meet demand-side pressures in the market. In simple terms: clients need architects to produce results faster. But not just any results. Clients need better and faster answers at the early stage of the development process.

Here’s one more tidbit from the Spacemaker call. When Havard Haukeland was introduced to eventual co-founder Carl Christensen, a software developer, Christensen initially thought Haukeland must be doing something wrong. He couldn’t believe that was the process architects utilize to answer these early-stage issues.

Special note: Anders Kvale, the third Spacemaker.ai co-founder introduced Haukeland to Christensen.

Further Analysis & Commentary: Both Spacemaker.ai and Digital Blue Foam are emblematic of the next-generation of software that synthetically marries data, AI, or ML algorithms with AAD technology. It appears that input pressures (market demand) are being led by organizations that are further along the adoption cycle of AI and big data technologies than the output organizations. The output organizations include the architects and planners and their established digital tools suppliers. The reason why we hear about frustrations by both sets of founders above, however, likely reflects a matrix of impediments preventing output capacity to match input pressures. 

It is not simply that the tools that most architects use can’t provide what building developers want answers to, the entire architecture and planning production apparatus, which consists of AE firm management formation and operations, is ill-prepared to meet the ‘step-change’ productivity demanded. It is imperative that incumbent software leaders take note of the gap between input pressures and output capacity. The problem is most software companies are customer-led (whether on an agile or classic waterfall model) as most businesses are. This gets into central issues around disruption in Clayton Christensen’s famous The Innovator’s Dilemma. If the AEC industry is the digital (ICT era) laggard we all think it is, isn’t this a very potential bad match-up between organizations in industries that are ICT era forerunners and the larger AEC industry? The foreruns are applying market demand pressures that architects cannot match using tools that are a step-change behind (ie: technologies at a 10x min. multiple differential). 

This is a very different context than the one for the CAD and BIM transformations. CAD developers in the early 1980s were not responding to market pressures on the demand side requesting productivity improvements at such step-change factors over hand-drafting. Many architects resisted moving to CAD for years because they found CAD rigid and inflexible to their overall processes. Early adoption centered CAD at the working drawings stage while designers continued to meet demand by clients with fast traditional hand rendering and drawing skills. Today, the front end of the process is now being hit by big pressures to not just hit deliverables on faster timelines but deliver data-infused and evidence-based results.

An entire article could be devoted to the industrial sectors and take-up of AI and big data and the relationship to input pressures on output side organizations (AE companies and their tools providers). However, I will scan through some of them in the next (emTech) content below, focused on a new AI chip company. 

AI Chip News

SimpleMachines is a new chip company on our radar that was brought to my attention when the CEO reached out to Architosh for a conversation. I was a bit stunned by the reach out, given that Architosh has not published leading-edge information on processors since our information on the AMD GPUs inside the 2013 Mac Pro. (see: Architosh, “The Mac Pro: So what’s a D300, D500 and D700 anyway? We have answers,” 24 October 2013)

Karu Sankaralingham is the CEO of SimpleMachines and he is an academic that has launched a revolutionary new approach to AI-specific microprocessors. I will touch on this AI chip below in brief and then link this conversation with the above one about industrial sectors that are engaging in AI technologies and big data. Companies that take-up AI technologies are speculatively more likely to want to link data and insight into asset operations. This will impact those who provide design and management of those assets (buildings and campuses).

An image of SimpleMachines’ new AI processor. This is the world’s first “algorithm-adaptive” AI chip and is built by TSMC on a 16nm process with packaged HBM2 memory. (Image: SimpleMachines  / Architosh)

The new SimpleMachines Mozart AI chip is a break-through “algorithm-adaptive” processor for fast inference and training. It operates with what the company calls a “composable computing paradigm” that in essence means that using the discovery of four course-grained behaviors that compose any algorithm, Mozart can operate faster AI functions across a broad spectrum of AI domains. Their compiler can respond to future algorithms not yet invented while offering dramatic performance.

Further Commentary: An interesting discovery in this conversation with SimpleMachines was that typical AI (machine learning) algorithms have a dramatic overhead on common CPUs (eg: Intel Skylakek core CPUs) and even GPUs. The overhead can be as high as 95 percent with application compute just the balance of 5 percent. Obviously, there are better ratios but not much better. Overhead is a dramatic problem unless an AI chip is built for a specific set of algorithms for tackling certain problems. SimpleMachines’ Mozart is aimed at creating a general and flexible AI compute architecture that has wide computational advantages (high compute, low overhead) over both CPUs, GPUs, and specialized AI chips. You can learn more here and at an upcoming in-depth feature on Architosh. 

In the meantime, here are some industrial sectors where AI is being deployed. (1) Automotive (connected and self-driving vehicles, driver assistance), (2) FinTech (financial services), (3) Manufacturing (generative design, factory optimization and floor improvements, robotics), (4) Healthcare (image analysis and diagnosis, drug discovery), (5) Retail (personalization, recommendation engines, demand forecasting), and (6) Telecom and Networking. 

Architects, planners, and engineers design assets for all of those industrial sectors. These clients likely are beginning to approach asset design and management borrowing lessons learned from the implementation of AI in their core industry activities. How might these lessons impact architects serving clients in these sectors? Will data from their activities begin to merge with their assets and vice versa? We are seeing it happening now with plant floor optimization. This was an area touched on in the last issue focused on Bentley Systems. (see Xpresso #21, “Bentley’s Now Public—YII20 Highlights and Re-attacking the Architecture Market,” Nov issue, 2020).  

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

We have several possibilities for the January issue of Xpresso but the market is rapidly adjusting to one very important factor in computing and that is Apple’s new M1 Macs. We will have our own M1 powered Mac mini next week and will begin testing CAD and 3D applications on it for performance comparison. We have noted on Architosh that the ODA has released new SDKs with Apple Silicon support.

Editor’s update: Our new Mac mini with M1 processor has arrived! We begin testing it this coming week.

The new Mac mini with Apple Silicon M1 chip. (Image: Apple / Architosh)

We are really curious to put the M1 Mac through its paces, both at the CPU and GPU level. One thing that we will mention in our SimpleMachines feature coming up on Architosh, is how Apple’s Neural Engine handles AI algorithms versus SimpleMachines.

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #23 in January.

Closing Notes

Another item on my mind is explaining to you all that the Xpresso Index and Glossary are still on the horizon. It has been moved back to Q1, 2021 to align with other Architosh site development updates.

What did Architosh INSIDER members Get?

Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus articles like this one provide architosh INSIDER annual subscribers with more of the content in the (emTech) section of our free monthly newsletter. While this article above features much of the latest issue of Xpresso (#22), there are more and deeper Further Analysis and Commentary sections, more images and inline video.

In addition, the Top Ten Must Reads actually feature 10 curated stories with our commentary and analysis of why we selected them. In Xpresso, only five are provided.

Member Access articles are a premium bonus to annual subscribers that add to the “unlimited site access” nature of your subscription. Thanks for subscribing!

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #22 appeared first on Architosh.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso 21 titled, Bentley’s Now Public — YII20 Highlights and Re-Attacking the Architecture Market

BENTLEY’S YEAR IN INFRASTRUCTURE 2020 was held virtually this year, following the pattern held by almost all conferences due to the global pandemic. In this article, we want to cover two primary themes, the first being a general summary of highlights on this year’s YII2020 conference and, secondly, a discussion about how Bentley aims to re-engage with architects in the BIM market with its OpenBuildings Designer platform.

Bentley knows from their own award program that their Microstation-based products like OpenBuildings Designer can handle massive projects on the performance front. This is why it has been successful in large infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is vertical or horizontal. “So we need to focus on the larger practices,” said Trierscheid. “They need to feel our rekindling of focus on building and modeling again.”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso #21. You can subscribe to Xpresso here, it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Gensler launches Blox, an algorithm-powered design visualization, and computational platform. Nobody should be surprised to hear that a global AEC design giant like Gensler is launching a new digital design platform. The new tool is called Blox and is part of the firm’s inFORM suite of “internally developed proprietary products” created just for Gensler, just to propel the architecture firm’s overall practice abilities.  (LinkedIn Pulse)

A proprietary computational design platform has been created at Gensler. You can see Gensler’s Blox in action in the video below.

What has Gensler said to explain this?  This is important for a range of reasons. Joseph Joseph, partner and global technology director, design technology studio, Gensler, writes that, “We believe that our craft as designers is founded on these superpowers that are innately human and irreplaceable by technology. As such, we believe that we stand to gain significantly by combining our human superpowers with computing cognition to achieve infinite possibilities thus elevating our value to a much higher purpose in the world.” 

You can watch the action here below:

2 – Positioning computational designers in your business: 4 things to consider. We came across this series of articles from Nathan Miller of Proving Ground via a newsletter from Building Design + Construction. Miller starts by making the point that there is little industry consensus about what a “computational designer” position actually is. He provides guidance, which is useful for any architect in a leadership role trying to figure out if adding this title or role in their firm is of value.  (BD+C)

What’s the skinny?  Computational design is not a technical role, Computational design is not equal to BIM. Computational design is not for everyone! Computational design equals solutions. This is an interesting high-level read of the issues around this role. 

3 – Meet JAILBOT, Hilti’s new construction robot. Construction industry toolmaker Hilti has introduced a new robot for construction, specifically for MEP work. The robot is a complete, self-contained, software, and hardware system that works semi-autonomously. It specifically is good at the layout and drilling of holes on the underside of floors above for anchoring suspended systems like HVAC ductwork, wire management trays, and suspended ceilings.  (BD+C)

Another specific-task construction robot, this one from Hilti. JAILBOT drills holes in ceiling situations like this one pictured, speeding up the work, increasing accuracy, and human safety. (Image: screengrab, YouTube video.)

Why is this important?   These systems require 3D spatial data in order to work, placing the emphasis on the usefulness of BIM models and their data in the overall AEC workflow process. The robot can drill with greater speed, accuracy, and safety, allowing human labor on the job site to focus their efforts on other tasks. JAILBOT works after data has been uploaded from Autodesk Revit or AutoCAD files to the Hilti Cloud. The robot comes with a rugged field tablet—which appears to be a tiny tablet running Microsoft Windows.  Watch the video of this robot here.

4 –  Meet the world’s newest architects: algorithms. This article from the World Economic Forum (WEF) brings to the attention of its global intellectual audience, the changing state of design in the field of architecture.  (WEF)

What matters?   This article from summer actually does a decent overview of the role algorithms-aided design (AAD) technology is playing in the field. It doesn’t get into tools but has some interesting links, such as this one on Introduction to Ant colony optimization (ACO). 

5 –  Biomimicry enables architects to make a “positive impact” on the environment…  says Exploration Architecture founder Michael Pawlyn.  (Dezeen)

Architect Michael Pawlyn holding up a segment of architecture inspired by biomimicry. (Image: screengrab, YouTube video.)

What is biomimicry?  Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. It involves looking at nature to understand how things work and can inspire architects and engineers to design more efficiently using morphological formations more similar to what we find in such things as trees, plants, and shells.

6.  Covid-19 challenges New York’s future.   This excellent article over at the Economist (from June) discusses how Covid-19 has impacted New York City. A quote: “By night, Manhattan holds 1.6m souls, a large number for a small island. In the morning over twice as many more rush in like a tide, filling up office blocks, coffee shops and spin classes. In the evening this tide drains back out over bridges and through tunnels, leaving just a thin residue of small-hours stop-outs and shift workers. The ebb and flow is shallower at weekends and in summer. But it has held its rhythm for more than a century.”  (Economist)

Edward Glaeser’s charting of wealth (per cap income) as it relates to density. Urban density increases human production efficiency which leads to higher GDP for denser places to live. In effect, cities are functioning like microprocessors. (see analysis below).

What impact did Covid have?  By mid-march, the ebb and flow of people coming into New York City stopped. So instead of a daily rush of 1.6m + additional souls coming into the city every day, practically zero new souls came into the city during the day. What an impact change. New York City generates USD 1.8 trillion GDP every year. Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University, has shown that urban density is good for the planet. It decreases our carbon footprint while increasing workers’ productivity. So cities are like highly efficient microprocessors. Like microchips, the tighter you get people together the faster they can make “production” of all sorts happen, and with less energy. 

7 – Digital Twins to play a bigger role in post-pandemic construction.  Digital twin technologies will make it possible for building owners to design and build for maximum social distancing and various scenarios.  (Construction Dive)

How?  A digital twin is more than just a BIM model. It includes all kinds of data about how a building is used, what times people fill the spaces inside, how packed spaces get, what rooms are used and which ones are not, how humans fill circulation paths, etc. Pedestrian traffic simulation software like Bentley’s LEGION is one such solution solving for social distancing as a criterion now in the age of Covid-19.

8 – New School of Design degree focuses on using robotics in architecture.  One of the US’s top colleges for design, Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design will offer a new master’s degree (started this fall) called Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS).  (Daily Pennsylvanian)

Why it matters? Penn’s new program will be one of the few architecture programs in the United States that use robots and artificial intelligence in design. The master’s degree requires ten courses and can be completed in nine months. 

9. An Overview of Digital Fabrication in Architecture.  This article from last month at ArchDaily captures some of the content we have brought to Xpresso many months ago, but it is worth bringing up because this article is a deep dive into the topic of digital fabrication in architecture, in general. (ArchDaily)

Why it matters? This article covers the various “areas” of digital fabrication in architecture. From Additive Manufacturing to Subtractive Manufacturing, to Automated Construction Processes, etc, this article gives a snapshot of each area. 

10 – Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Here’s how we escape.  Here is a quote from this excellent article by Richard Fisher:  “Just as children expand their temporal perceptions as they age, so too has our species over millennia. Like toddlers, our pre-human ancestors had no sense of a distant future. They lived only in the present. Humanity’s trajectory from tool-wielding hominins to the architects of grand metropolises has been interwoven with our ever-expanding sense of time. Unlike other animals, we have minds capable of imagining a deep future, and we can conceive the daunting truth that our lifetime is a mere flash in an unfathomable chronology.  (Technology Review)

Why is it difficult to escape?  Fisher explains that part of our 21st-century ills is this very dangerous short-termism—driven by a world saturated in media across all kinds of screens, the dailyness of social media, and the difficulty of getting beyond our next news cycle. He argues we have become stuck in the “now.” Is this why, perhaps, American put a reality TV star into the White House, because he was the right person to keep them focused on the day, the now, rather than on looking and building for the future? 

This short-terminism is taking our eye off the necessity of taking care of our planet and its precious resources…off making the necessary changes to address long-term human sustainability. We have become the antithesis of the medieval builders of cathedrals, those often lauded for their long-term thinking for creating structures that would last centuries and generations far beyond them. 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

Siemens and Parasolid: Apple Sillicon

In the last issue, we said we had something special coming up that delved into Apple Silicon-based Macs (ARM Macs) and the CAD markets. Just about three weeks ago when we took that article to the company from which the interview came, they said something had changed between the months when we last spoke and now and that we could not publish it. Instead, they said, “hold off another two weeks and things will become more clear.” In fact, they wanted us to come back in two weeks and do another interview because they had new news.

A week later, Apple announced its “One more thing” event.

I won’t say any more about that particular unnamed company but another part of our planned Special Feature for this issue of Xpresso was our discussions with Seimens about Parasolid and Apple Silicon. What follows below are some highlights from my discussion in the summer with Phil Nanson, Manager, Parasolid Components, Siemens PLM Software, where he is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

We had an extensive discussion. We will just jump into some of it below:

(Xpresso) What was it like in terms of investment time to build out Parasolids for Apple’s iOS platform and how might that relate to the effort to transition support for Parasolid for macOS on Apple Silicon?

(Phil Nanson, Siemens) iOS was a harder port but not our hardest. Most of our challenges were in testing rather than getting Parasolid to run. Obviously, supporting so many customers we do a lot of automated testing. Currently, we are running 90,000 tests a night on the iOS platform. We run about 4 million tests a night across all platforms and builds. Getting all that infrastructure to work in the very different environment of a tablet where there is a whole different set of assumptions to the usage model and productivity…that’s where the main cost was.

So infrastructure we could then reuse very easily when it came to supporting Android because a lot of the problems are the same. And I would expect Apple’s ARM Macs would be easier, one that that is more likely to follow the paradigms of a desktop.

Further Analysis & Commentary: So the challenges for the modeling kernel on other operating systems aren’t just about differences among chip architectures but very much also about how devices are used and how that impacts usage models at the point of interface with software. This impacts testing infrastructure. Apple ARM-Macs will be used like all Macs today are used. We don’t see Apple making their new Macs hybrids with touch screen interfaces. Such a move makes them iPads. Instead, we see the Touch Bar and the touch-based functions of the Track-Pad as being the only areas where new challenges for the Parasolid modeling kernel may come up. 

So at this point, you have completely supported Parasolid on other ARM-based platforms? 

Yes. They are supported on Apple’s iOS and Google Android.

Those 90,000 tests per night on iOS, do they include actually testing CAD applications as part of your tests? 

Our general tests include CAD applications. We don’t do that on iOS but we do it on Linux and platforms with heavy service. Our standard tests include all the project tests we’ve written. And we are normally testing all the PRs anyone’s ever submitted to us. We try to have a combination of testing the things that are developed in QA and testing anything anyone has ever found as an issue.

Further Analysis & Commentary: We can safely assume iOS developers doing CAD/3D pro apps have submitted issues and these are being tested regularly as part of standard tests. 

(Xpresso) Apple offered developers the opportunity to acquire ARM-based Macs in the form of Mac minis for testing. Is Parasolid in possession of one of those machines? 

(Phil Nanson, Siemens) We are expecting to be in possession soon. (Editor’s note. this was back in July when we spoke.)

When you did your iOS version of Parasolid, what was the general duration of time to port Parasolid? 

I think it took us 6-9 months. That was one of our harder ports because of the infrastructure changes.

If it took you the same time with Macs on Apple Silicon, it would probably put you in a really good position. 

We are targeting the point of production, early next year.

Tim Millet, VP Platform Architecture, Apple, inside an Apple Lab focused on Apple Silicon. (Image: screengrab from Apple Event in September)

Do you have any sense of the CAD industry, in general, moving to ARM architecture platforms? You have said you see a greater interest in tablets. Do you also see a greater interest in CAD in the data center, where people can access these machines through virtual desktops? 

I believe it will be completely driven by performance and price. The effect of that transition will make people much more agnostic because the machines won’t be sitting in front of them. People are more likely to switch more quickly and dramatically than when they have to invest in the hardware. So it definitely increases the likelihood people will switch.

Further Analysis & Commentary: On this last question, what I am driving at is will ARM-based workstations (remember Apple’s Mac Pro will likely be the first) placed in the cloud enable greater switching between platforms?  If ‘CAD tool A’ is new and written for Apple Silicon Macs and a user is considering it, would it be easier to consider switching if it was available in cloud computing form? Phil is making the point, which I agree with, that depending on cost and performance, if they don’t have to invest in the hardware it can definitely increase their likelihood of switching. One hopes then that Apple fully supports its new ARM-based Macs to be used in data centers for robust support for virtualized application serving. This can enable fluidity in the software market giving developers more incentive to enable ways for potential customers to try their new apps. 

A SketchUp Killer? Meet Snaptrude from India

Architosh was recently contacted by a new company out of India. Meet, Snaptrude.

Snaptrude is a cloud-based concept design tool that aims to close the gap between design phase work and BIM phase work. Quoting their website, “With Snaptrude Architects can literally squeeze the mundane manual tasks of hours into a few minutes on a single  platform on the cloud.”

The company is very new and we hope to go through a demo with the company’s CEO, Altaf Ganihar very soon. Ganihar is a mathematics genius and realized the problems architects were facing while a young scholar working in the field of computer graphics and machine learning in 2014. He was surprised to learn how real architects and designers actually work, how fragmented and tedious the existing design process actually is.

Snaptrude is cloud-based and can run on multiple device types as shown here in this image. (Image: screengrab: Snaptrude.com)

The goal of Snaptrude is to change this, to introduce new technologies that allow for seamlessness in the design process.

Further Analysis & Commentary: On the surface—and again we have yet to actually engage with this new tool—Snaptrude looks similar to SketchUp in its web version, but clearly there is much more going on here from the visuals seen on the company’s website. What is enchanting about its main graphics is that the design process begins with a napkin sketch, then a photo of the napkin sketch, then it finds its way in Snaptrude from where the design process accelerates from rough concept modeling to the beginnings of a 3D architectural model with wall thicknesses and openings and then furniture and data appear. 

Evan Troxel Talk: 

Architect Evan Troxel, of the TRXL Podcast, which focuses on how technology is changing the architectural profession, has released a video recorded talk he gave at HMC Architects, of Ontario, California. This has actually been up since March of this year but I wanted to bring this to your attention because it fits squarely on the emerging technologies (emTech) focus of the Xpresso newsletter.

Architect Evan Troxel, Director of Digital Practice, HMC Architects, and creator and host of the podcast TXRL presenting a talk on disruption in Architecture. (Image: screengrab)

The topic of his talk is “Disruption.” Really about how technology is disrupting the field AEC fields and in this case how technology can disrupt the field and profession of architecture.

Architect Evan Troxel, Director of Digital Practice, HMC Architects, and creator and host of the podcast TXRL presenting a talk on disruption in Architecture. (Image: screengrab)

Evan goes over what defines technology “disruption” using Clayton Christensen’s definition from his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change).” Evan also mentions “The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts,” by Richard and Daniel Susskind. These are both books I have read and worth re-reading, in fact, and Evan does a great job of going through examples of disruption and looking at a range of newcomers in AEC that could be disruptive. To watch his talk go here and check out the video on YouTube. 

You can learn more about Evan and hear his superb podcast series, TRXL. here.

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

Bentley OpenBuildings Designer

Gensler Blox

Hilti JAILBOT 

Penn Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS)

Parasolid

Apple Silicon (M1)

Snaptrude

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Firms to Fail

The Future of the Professions

Closing Notes

We are still working on our introduction of version 1.0 of our Xpresso Reader Glossary and Index. It turned out to be a big project. It will make a nice seasonal Holiday Gift!

What did Architosh INSIDER members Get?

Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus articles like this one provide architosh INSIDER annual subscribers with more of the content in the (emTech) section of our free monthly newsletter. While this article above features much of the latest issue of Xpresso (#21), there are more and deeper Further Analysis and Commentary sections, more inline videos, and an issue index with links—just for annual INSIDER member subscribers like you.

In addition, the Top Ten Must Reads actually feature 10 curated stories with our commentary and analysis of why we selected them. In Xpresso, only five are provided.

Member Access articles are a premium bonus to annual subscribers that add to the “unlimited site access” nature of your subscription. Thanks for subscribing!

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #21 appeared first on Architosh.

We are shifting gears as readers tell us they would prefer more of our emerging technologies (emTech) content, not “earlier access.”

From now on our previously titled “Early Access (emTech) Section for INSIDER Xpresso” reports will be called “Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus.” Each issue will arrive on or around the same day as that month’s Xpresso newsletter. Xpresso 19 came out three days ago, for example.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of architosh INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso 19 titled, Zach Soflin Talks to Architosh About Layer App. 

THERE IS A VERY GOOD CHANCE a lot of Xpresso readers have not heard of the Layer App. Born out of the mid-west from within an architecture firm (BVH Architecture) and generated to tackle the needs of an extensive rehabilitation project to Bertram Goodhue’s icon Nebraska State Capitol, Layer as first seen at AIA was a striking example both good “mobile-first” software design but also excellence in integration-oriented design.

In our Curated emTech section below we continue in-depth about the importance of software integration as it relates to BIM (Building Information Modeling), but Layer too is itself born out of this recognition that interoperability—at the granular level of data—is vastly more important than interoperability of file types.

In our discussion with Soflin, who is a licensed architect, we delve into the Layer App and why it is a key new application in AECO.

Layer — What It Does

Layer is an application that addresses the needs of managing the profound amounts of data (information) typical of most building projects. While the Layer App began from the side of “design” in the design-build-operate model, Soflin and his team saw early interest from both “build” and “operate” professionals.

Layer is a completely flexible and customizable project management application that is built for use in the field, the job site trailer, and the office. “A lot of our overall vision for what the platform can provide is aimed at beyond the design professional,” says Soflin. “Layer is a platform for the entire building lifecycle.”

To read the full story, click here to Xpresso 19. You can subscribe to Xpresso here, it’s free!

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Process Management in Construction, is the title of this Forbes piece by David A. Teich, featuring the mention of Buildots, a company working to use computer vision to compare a construction site to the plans (or more correctly BIM models) of a future building. felt.  (Forbes)

What’s new about this?  We have seen robots fitted with cameras collecting and streaming video to AI-instilled software to analyze a construction site to a BIM model and data. What’s new here is that the camera is construction helmet-mounted. It takes video at 2-fps. It doesn’t need a smooth video; it uses just lots of images. And like other systems, they are feed to AI-based software to inspect and compare.

2 – Katerra sheds 400 more employees. The fourth round of staff cuts at construction unicorn Katerra leads to 7 percent of its workforce getting pink-slipped. This follows the replacement of founding CEO Michael Marks with Paul Kibsgaard, instituted by SoftBank which has invested USD 1.4 billion in Katerra. (Silicon Valley Bus Journal)

Katerra goes through more staff changes but the SoftBank-based company is North America’s largest mass timber producer and the only company offering end-to-end mass timber design, manufacturing, and construction. (Image: Katerra)

What’s the low-down?  SoftBank has invested a ton of money in this construction unicorn and recent changes are driven at accelerating a path to profitability. This report notes that Katerra has 6,000 multifamily units under construction and other recent reports note that the Menlo Park-based company (valued at USD 4 billion) North America’s largest mass timber producer, offering end-to-end mass timber design, manufacturing, and construction. This makes it a pivotal green economy new company in the AECO space. 

3 – Computational design helps deliver Australia’s largest sustainable tower. This piece in BIM Today discusses 6-8 Parramatta Square, part of one of the biggest sustainable urban projects in Australia. Designed by Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW), these stunning new towers use Bentley’s GenerativeComponents (GC) technology inside Bentley OpenBuilding Designer BIM software.  (BIM Today)

A street-level rendered view of 6 & 8 Parramatta Square, designed by award-winning Australian architecture firm Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW). (Image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

What is valuable in this story?   The important piece about 6-8 Parramatta is the unique use of computational design to solve problems for the architects and their consultants and the general contractor in the later stages of the project. Usually, we see AAD (algorithms-aided design) technology deployed in the design stage. Architosh recognized the unique aspects of this Bentley Year-in-Infrastructure Award-Winning project last year and wrote an in-depth feature here. 

4 –  ETH Zurich Researchers Develop Novel DFAM Framework for Multi-Flow Nozzle Designs  Unique research work coming out of ETH Zurich has implications for the world of 3D printing or computational design for additive manufacturing (DfAM).  The work focuses on a computational design framework for FDM nozzles.  (3DPI)

What’s new about this?  This research is essentially saying that complex parts require complex tools, in this case, more complex 3D printing nozzles. For those interested in 3D printing or DfAM this is a must-read. The article also links to similar research at other universities, including Harvard. 

5 – Parametric design: style and substance?  Computational design is not “wacky” form-finding, begins this article by Ben Knight writing for the newsroom at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. Knight is writing about the importance of “parametricism” as championed by principal architect Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects. This article is ultimately an argument for parametricism not as form-finding but solving more critical issues in architecture. (UNSW)

Computational design was used for this project that solved for optimal floor plan configuration to best enable efficiencies. This had little to do with the parametricism used strickly for form-finding and everything to do with building performance against a measurable and understood metric.

A sign of the future?  Quoting UNSW associate professor M. Hank Haeusler, “for us, the engagement with computational methods and tools isn’t to change the way the architecture looks, as a new parametric design style.” He says they are teaching computational design methods to solve the grand problems facing architects.

6 – Architecture graduate student recognized with computational design award.

Özgüç Çapunaman, a doctoral candidate in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture, has been recognized for his research by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) as the recipient of the Young CAADRIA Award. His research centers on interactive digital fabrication, programmable composites, computational making, and architectural tool development.  (Archinect)

One to watch because!  Çapunaman’s paper submission focuses on interactive digital fabrication workflow. His research, which he began to establish during his time at Carnegie Mellon University, aims to question the human relationship with digital fabrication tools that are used in the field, such as CAM and CAD. 

“The paper presents an interactive and adaptive design-fabrication workflow where the user can actively take turns in the fabrication process,” Çapunaman wrote in his abstract. “The proposed experimental setup utilizes paste extrusion additive manufacturing in tandem with real-time control of an industrial robotic arm. By incorporating a computer-vision based feedback loop, it captures momentary changes in the fabricated artifact introduced by the users to inform the digital representation.”

7 – The Secret of AI is People. 

Too many business leaders still believe that AI is just another ‘plug and play’ incremental technological investment. In reality, gaining a competitive advantage through AI requires organizational transformation of the kind exemplified by companies leading in this era: Google, Haier, Apple, Zappos, and Siemens. These companies don’t just have better technology — they have transformed the way they do business so that human resources can be augmented with machine powers. (Harvard Business Review)

Why is this story important?  A multistage five-year study looked at five leading organizations and what brought them success with AI. The big take-away is counter-intuitive—it’s not about bein technology-driven or tech-forward. The secret is making the businesses model transformations so that automation augments humans and vice versa. Human skills matter—creativity, care, intuition, adaptability, and innovation are areas machines cannot match humans. To read how leaders get the most out of AI putting humans into the equation for maximum success, read here. 

8 – Builder a Better Machine for an AI World.  Raja Koduri has been in the thick of the past two eras of computing, which were marked by – among other things – the ability to architect systems and software that helped to get more performance into the hands into increasing numbers of people. From leadership stints at AMD (twice), Apple, and now Intel, he is currently Intel chief architect, vice president, and general manager of the Cores and Visual Computing and Edge Computing Solutions unit at Intel.  (The Next Platform)

Why is this story important?  Raja describes how we went from 1 billion PCs in the era of the personal computer and Internet to 10 billion devices in the mobile plus cloud era, and now we are moving toward the 100 connected devices, with IoT and AI and the need for exascale computing. “All of this represents a 10-fold opportunity for the IT industry, but it’s going to demand massive amounts of expensive compute power, a demand that already is doubling every three to four months, Koduri said. By 2025, the world will be creating 175 zettabytes of data.” 

9 – Apple Silicon Macs—chip production on schedule.  Chip production for the first Apple Silicon Macs is reported to be on schedule for launch before the end of the year.   (9to5 Mac)

The new ARM Macs will be based on an Apple chip architected around the specific needs of each Mac device—from mobiles to the Mac Pro.

What Macs will get Apple Silicon First?  Apple will be delivering 5nm SoC (system on a chip) processors for its next-gen Macs in the 4th quarter of 2020, according to reports. 5nm is vastly smaller than the 14 and 10nm processors from Intel, and will thus enable Apple significant advantages to pack tremendous compute power inside its svelt form-factors. While there are conflicting reports of a 12-in MacBook versus a new iMac and a new MacBook Pro being first to obtain Apple Silicon, either way this is an important inflection point in the computer industry. 

10  – The Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau Discusses Robotics Start-Ups and Autonomous Robots for Construction.  Tessa Lau is Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, whose mission is to increase construction industry productivity by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Dusty’s FieldPrinter autonomous mobile robots prints layout plans directly onto the floors of job sites using information from building information models (BIM) as a guide.  (Robotics Business Review)

The importance of Robots in AEC. Having a robot print out the floor plan on the concrete deck of a building is a non-obvious win-win for AEC. It’s a task that gets done with people and transits and tape measures. But Tessa Lau’s robot ingests BIM documents and with that data in-hand can play a significant role in augmenting human tasks on the job site. Read on to learn more about their USD 5 million seed round. 

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries

The Future of BIM Interop:

Recently, after we published our first article on the Revit Open Letter by a group of British architects, I was contacted by the folks at 3D Repo, in the UK. Dr. Jozef Dobos, CEO of 3D Repo initially wrote in to discuss his views on the Revit Open Letter movement. He also, however, shared his views on the future of interoperability (interop) in the AECO industry.

AEC Delta Project

Dr. Dobos chimed in on the Revit Open Letter partly because he felt the AECO industry is at an important inflection point in its digital tools history. Being that better “interoperability” was one of the main sticking points in the open letter he wanted to introduce to Architosh his company’s work on an open-source technology his company helped create and shared and is known in the industry as the AEC Delta project.

A lead slide image from the Dr. Al Fisher presentation on the AEC Delta project. (Image: Buro Happold)

The AEC Delta project, in a nutshell, is an API technology project that enables applications to talk to each other and exchange data, including BIM applications. Some of the technology is embedded inside 3D Repo’s namesake web application focused on the AECO industry.

Dr. Dobos explained that AEC Delta is a collaboration between several companies in the UK that began in 2019. The notable engineering firm Buro Happold is one of those companies. As part of the Innovate UK-funded project, Dr. Al Fisher of Buro Happold goes through what AEC Delta is all about in this recorded event (here on YouTube), noting that AEC Delta, as a funded project, included partners Buro Happold, UCL, Rhomberg Sersa (Rail Group), and 3D Repo. Additional partners include HOK, Georgia Tech, ARUP, Hypar, SNC Lavalin, and Atkins.

The project has three project deliverables, including an Open Delta specification, an open REST API specification, and open-source reference implementations.

Dr. Fisher discussing the limitations of how we share information today in the AEC BIM world.

The specific problem being addressed is how we share information in the AEC BIM industry. Today we share entire models (files we pass back and forth) but in the future, we will share only the data that has changed in models (deltas). (see the images above and below.)

Another view showing how “information” would be shared using a modern “diffing” process where software solutions pass along only the changes or “deltas” between systems which would be connected via APIs and talk to each other in often real-time methods.

The current method is just as inefficient as in the world of changing 2D drawing files, to some extend. Both methods create large payloads, create problems for tracking changes, and are inefficient. AEC Delta project technology wants to be “transactional” not on a “file basis” but on a “diff” (diffing) basis. The term “diffing” comes from the GitHub world and it relates to how modern software is developed across geography and time.

Rhino and Grasshopper are talking to 3D Repo and Speckle Works applications using this new AEC Delta open-source technology using Buro Happold’s HBoM (life adapter) that passes data across the applications shown above. Watch the video here.

Dr. Al Fisher shows in his talk early work at Buro Happold linking in their internal code (a plugin inside Rhino+GH) based on AEC Delta open-source specifications connecting to Speckle Works and 3D Repo. You can see all three applications updating each other using this new open-source AEC Delta technology at 11:13 in the video here. One has to admit this technology is cool and exciting!

You can see Buro Happold’s contribution to this project here at The Buildings and Habitats object model (BHoM) web page.

Further Analysis and Commentary:  Here I would like to point out that one factor helping drive the push for software in AEC that is less file-dependent for interoperability (interop) is the general push for applications in the cloud. If you noticed, one of the company’s listed in the Dr. Fisher seminar was Hypar. Hypar is entirely cloud-driven and you operate it in your browser. It can ingest files and output files but the large point is it represents the types of AECO industry tools that represent the future. It is not surprising to see them get involved in the AEC Delta project. 

ASITE and 3D Repo

The folks at 3D Repo are very serious about the future of BIM/AEC interop. As one of the partners in the AEC Delta project, they have developed their own Diff technology and APIs to pass data back and forth to other applications. Dr. Jozef Dobos shared with me several webinar recordings that have taken place in the recent past. One of those was a webinar with ASITE and 3D Repo focused on custom integrations using each other’s respective APIs.

As explained in the webinar (which you can watch here, in full) ASITE sees themselves as “primarily in the business of holding data.” And of providing that data to other software systems for use.

ASITE features “workflows” which are fully customizable and can involve third-party applications via API integrations. In this particular webinar, the focus was on the integration between ASITE and 3D Repo. To build automation between these two platforms “trigger” events are built into each application (into specific workflows in ASITE, for example).

ASITE’s Take on Software Evolution

One of the more fascinating moments in this webinar recording was the discussion about the history of software. Traditionally, when new and successful software enters the market it offers a “unique selling point” (USP). Essentially, the entire software product builds features around its USP known as its core functionality (CF). (see the diagram below.)

Rob Clifton, senior VP, ASITE, explains during this talk about how software has existed in the past (left in the diagram above) and how the present and future are shaping up. Successful software begins with a USP (unique selling point). Core functionality wraps the USP, but wider features add functionality that is not intrinsic to the USP and often overlap with competitor products. (wider functionality is outside core functionality and therefore does not deepen the USP.

When software expands its feature set it moves further away from its USP. This has two often undesired consequences. A widening of features places the software application in an ever-widening overlap with competitor software, while also diminishing focus and resources on the USP.

Tech giants try to cover everything. Because they offer “connected platforms” there is an advantage in their tools working together. (think Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk, as examples). But this diversity and wide breadth of coverage tend to take away from focusing on their core areas of expertise and their USPs. The giants focus on tie-ins in their suites and platforms selling the virtue of strong connections and interop via “the platform.” (eg: Microsoft leveraging its OS with its own web browser — see the left side of the diagram below).

In the past, the value of software was placed on the strength of the USP. The strength of connections was often based on the software being connected by a platform under one company. But today’s market is shaping up differently. Through API integrations, unique USPs from diverse software solutions can be connected to each other—not by virtue of a single platform under a single company but—via APIs built on solid and open technologies freely available to all.

ASITE says the focus today in software is building out technologies that enable great connections between tools that are owned by separate companies and our outside major platforms, offering the advantages of connected data without the disadvantages of “legacy-oriented” file-based interop limitations. This is precisely what Zach Soflin, founder of Layer App, is talking about in the special feature above.

The advantage is you get better coverage of your business’ requirements (being able to use best-of-breed tools together via API connections) but also gain the advantage of setting up your solutions in a much more personalized way than one can do with limiting yourself to collections of tools in single company platforms.

By leveraging a diverse set of USPs (multiple best-in-breed tools) and building out custom workflows via API integrations, companies to tailor digital solutions to their specific needs at ever more personalized and effective levels.

Rob Clifton, senior vice president of ASITE puts it this way: “…it is important when you are selecting software to work with that it is apart of this larger network of integrations. Software that sits out on its own and integrates poorly does not offer you the same potential and capacity going forward and is not as future-proof as those that are really connected to this web of software solutions.” He draws the comparison to Apple’s iPhone and notes the phone is the platform but all the apps on it are customized to each person.

To watch this presentation in full go here. 

Further Analysis and Commentary:  In watching the ASITE and 3D Repo presentation the ASITE folks did note that to the uninitiated, setting up custom workflows in ASITE takes some training and experience. But it does not take any programming experience. This is a no-code / low-code environment.

In general, the larger point is that building custom workflows are worth it. One example showed the integration of SafetiBase with 3D Repo. “Pins” for the location of safety issues noticed in the field could be automatically located back in 3D Repo in the BIM model view. Likewise, another example showed how to add a barcode reader field to a custom tool built with Microsoft’s Power Automate and Power Apps and have that data passed back to 3D Repo automatically upon scanning an item in the field.

Further 3D Repo Discussions

Dr. Jozef Dobos keyed us into several 3D Repo webinars that are recorded that cover other integrations and just 3D Repo in general. 

For example, there is a case study on 3D Repo and SafetiBase, which is an app focused on job site safety management. This is a PAS 1192-6 compliant risk register and database solution. More on this use of 3D Repo and SafetiBase can be found here. 

A webinar featuring the use of 3D Repo and SafetiBase used together in an integrated way.

For the Hinkley Point C project in the UK, 3D Repo’s patent-pending 3D Diff change detection tool is discussed in detail. This is another interesting case study of cloud-based AECO tools talking to each other in an intelligent integrated workflow offering great advantages over the limitations of passing BIM files around the AECO world of stakeholders. 

Another 3D Repo case study worth looking at is this one on the Canary Wharf Wood Wharf project. And finally, this case study looks at PlanBase and 3D Repo for a planning portal for the Greater London Authority and London’s Mayor’s Office. 

Digital Tools for Building Integrations

Tools for helping users build-out “integrations” between software systems are growing and the ASITE and 3D Repo webinar listed several. While ASITE’s webinar touted the virtues of Microsoft’s Power Automate (formerly Flow), competitors include all of the following:

• boomi — their tagline is “instantly connect everything to everything.” 
• MuleSoft — this tool offering seems like Zapier for enterprises, in other words, connecting more enterprise software solutions together rather than consumer/prosumer oriented tool offerings. 
• Zapier — a mainstay in the integrations game, Zapier is aimed at small to medium enterprises (SME) and we at Architosh already have good experiences with Zapier for several automations used for both Architosh and for AEC projects. 
• Node-RED — this is a low-code programming tool. 
• Power Automate (Flow) — this is Microsoft’s tool now and was used in the ASITE to 3D Repo integrations seen in the webinar discussed (video here). 

One could search the web for even more integration offerings. Some of these solutions have traction in the AEC space due to their early lead in the integrations market. For example, Zapier has integrations with Procore where you can receive a digest email from Procore’s RFIs. You can also set up Zapier to send you an SMS text message when a new RFI is created in Procore. Procore itself has an App Marketplace dedicated to integrations that exist while its published APIs enable folks (both software companies and end-users with software skills) to build new integrations. After all, this is the future folks! 

Zapier even let’s site visitors select a professional role (eg: Project Manager—which is appropriate for AECO folks) and it will list out what they call Zap Templates that match a selection of your apps and how Zapier has pre-existing integrations. See this page to start. 

As noted above, another aspect noted in the webinar was using 3D Repo as a hub and looking at how to connect to various AEC workflows and it with Microsoft PowerApps.  This tool, too, has competitive offerings but it was PowerApps shown in the webinar. 

• Retool — connect to most databases and anything with a REST, GraphQL, or gRCP API. 
• Betty Blocks — this offering is all about how humans with ideas are the future, not systems. They have a tagline that says, “By 2023, anyone can build an application.”
• JotForm — which was used in the 3D Repo webinar. It’s an easy-to-use online form builder.
• Amazon Honeycode — another Betty Blocks competitor by the Amazon giant! No programming needed to build bespoke apps for your workflows. 
• PowerApps — Low-code solution by Microsoft. 

The Revit Open Letter

An Update

Over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to speak more with lain Godwin, the AEC industry veteran and IT consultant who has helped co-ordinate the Revit Open Letter initiated in Great Britain. I also had the opportunity to interview Autodesk CEO, Andrew Anagnost. Let’s start with the update from Godwin.

The ‘Letters to Autodesk” website went up in August to expedite the ability for firms to sign the letter. From my latest conversation with Godwin, the total signatories are now nearly 200 firms around the globe, in total with a significant number who signed anonymously. I understand from both Godwin and Anagnost that Anagnost and a small Autodesk team held a virtual meeting with the original British group of signatories. Anagnost on my call with him noted it was a productive call but that the contents of that call were confidential amongst the participants. Godwin was not a party to that meeting but did hear sentiment from the British firms who were attendees.

One of the issues that is a sore point with the signatories was apparently the group’s feelings about Anagnost’s defense of Revit software costs. Anagnost personally penned a blog post on Autodesk’s website addressing the British firms and the post had mixed reactions globally. In my call with Anagnost, he spent only a small amount of time addressing the licensing cost issue but I pushed hard to explain from an architect’s experience (in this case my three-plus decades as an architect) that not everyone who works in a CAD or BIM program does so every day or even every week. I suggested that if other software companies can implement “usage-based” licensing (named or otherwise) that Autodesk could also. Anagnost agreed and said that their users’ licensing issues will get addressed more fully in the near future. The named licensing model does not preclude the ability of Autodesk to implement licensing models based on usage.

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

Buildots

Katerra

Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW)

Bentley GenerativeComponents

ETH Zurich

UNSW, Sydney, Australia

Dusty Robotics

AEC Delta Project

Buro Happold

ASITE

3D Repo

SafetiBase

Zapier

Procore

We listed several tools in the section above titled, Digital Tools for Building Integrations. 

Closing Notes

We planned to introduce version 1.0 of our Xpresso Reader Glossary and Index but we were unable to hit our deadline. So look forward to this next month for sure!

What did Architosh INSIDER members Get

Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus articles like this one provide architosh INSIDER annual subscribers with more of the content in our (emTech) section of our free monthly newsletter. While this article above features much of the latest issue of Xpresso (#19), all of the Further Analysis and Commentary sections, and all of the Architosh Blue text is bonus material just for this article—just for annual INSIDER member subscribers like you.

In addition, the Top Ten Must Reads actually feature 10 curated stories with our commentary and analysis of why we selected them. In Xpresso, only five our provided.

Member Access articles are a premium bonus to annual subscribers that add to the “unlimited site access” nature of your subscription. Thanks for subscribing!

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #19 appeared first on Architosh.

We are shifting gears as readers tell us they would prefer more of our emerging technologies (emTech) content, not “earlier access.”

From now on our previously titled “Early Access (emTech) Section for INSIDER Xpresso” reports will be called “Member Access—(emTech) Section Plus.” Each issue will arrive on or around the same day as that month’s Xpresso newsletter. Xpresso 17 came out yesterday, for example.

(emTech) Section Plus is about providing “more” content on emerging technologies—the primary topic of the Xpresso newsletter. This deeper version of (emTech) is provided exclusively for annual subscribers of INSIDER Membership.

Special Feature

We published a special feature in Xpresso 17 yesterday that is titled, Stamhuis Good Design Requires Speed—Generative Design in Revit Powers Company Growth. 

Achieving high volumes and lots of repeat customer work, Stamhuis—a leading retail builder in Europe—has evolved into a juggernaut of automated efficiency. They have built this process on Autodesk BIM and project management tools mixed with powerful customized Dynamo programming. 

THERE IS OFTEN THIS MISCONCEPTION that speed and design are at fundamental odds with each other—that the latter will always compromise the former. But why is that?

The meaning of Speed

One key reason is that good design requires the ingredient of time itself. For Stamhuis, they are learning how to gain back more time so their designers can take on more strategic work, by tapping the power of generative design through Dynamo. What the Netherlands-based company saves on time, they also give back to the project client. 

Stamhuis’s specialty is the design and build-out of liquor stores, convenience stores, and supermarkets. In this market, time is of the essence for their clients; when stores go through remodels, customers will temporarily shop elsewhere. It is critical that store renovations are back up and running before customers adopt substitutes permanently. So time—far from being the enemy of good design—in this case, is a vital ingredient in client success. 

The master Dynamo script establishes a sophisticated semi-automated design workflow within Autodesk Revit offering Stamhuis a massive speed-up in laying out retail stores for its many clients. The system utilizes the company’s very large Revit family of objects. (Image: Stamhuis)

Speed, in the case of Stamhuis’s accomplishments, is virtuous on two fronts. Faster project delivery helps clients with success, faster processes due to Dynamo utilization help Stamhuis designers take on more strategic work, ultimately benefitting the company and its clients. 

So how did they get there?

To read the rest of this story, click here to Xpresso 17. You can subscribe to Xpresso here.

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Surprising study: Urban density doesn’t cause more COVID-19 infections, even promotes lower death rates is the title of a new report published in late June. The research report contends that a potential mass exodus from dense cities may actually be a bad idea for everyone.  (Study Finds)

Why is this upside-down from common sense? The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study found that higher “infection rates” were not actually linked to higher densely populated places. Even more surprising, more densely populated areas have lower Covid-19 death rates. The full article and research report unpacks these surprising findings for you. One final quote: “These findings suggest that urban planners should continue to practice and advocate for compact places rather than sprawling ones, due to the myriad well-established benefits of the former, including health benefits,” says the lead author, Shima Hamidi, Ph.D.  The study was published in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

2 – Coronavirus Bringing Winter to the Drone Industry –  This interesting (Forbes) piece unwraps the surprising tale of how drones are doing a hero’s work during this pandemic, yet it is precisely the conditions of the pandemic that are now hurting the drone industry from taking off.

What’s the low-down? UPS and CVS are testing drones to carry prescription drugs to a Florida retirement community, and China is using drones to spray disinfectant in over 3 million square meters in Shenzhen. Yet, the pandemic has caused a cascade of bad financial and regulatory news for the nascent industry; test sites critical to the FAA’s crafting of rules for airspace have been closed, and venture capital issues are placing new pressures on the industry. 

3 – Six Epidemics from American History Show How Urban Design Affects Our Health This story published on Northeaster University’s website focuses on assistant professor of architecture, Sara Jensen Carr, and her upcoming book, The Topography of Wellness.  (Northeastern University)

Why this story matters today? Jensen Carr is definitely on topic. Her upcoming book chronicles six health crises throughout U.S. history and how those epidemics informed the design of cities. She writes that the gridded American cite became more important after the cholera outbreak when infected water pooled in crooked, unpaved streets. City officials wanted to get fresh water in and bad waste out of the city efficiently. “The net effect,” she writes, “is that we have straighter streets to accommodate long pipes underneath to move water and waste more safely.” 

Jensen Carr notes that the city was really thought of as an incubator of disease for much of American history. “That was especially true in the early 19th century when people believed in a theory called miasma, the idea that diseases floated aimlessly through the air and water.” 

4 –  AIA: Reopening America: Strategies for safer buildings  – I wanted to share this feature on the AIA’s website because it includes a set of dedicated articles focused on strategies for reopening up specific building types that are challenged by the current COVID-19 pandemic.  (AIA)

The AIA has published a series of reports with guidance on specific building types for strategically reopening America. (Image: AIA)

What’s essential here? Included are a series of highly illustrative and impactful strategic articles with plans and 3D illustrations (see above) for opening up (1) Offices, (2) Schools, (3) Retail Stores, (4) Senior Living Facilities, and finally (5) safer buildings in general. The AIA has also put together useful links on COVID-19 here.

5 – Analytics: Social Distancing in the workplace  – This story on Buro Happold’s website discusses how analytics and insight will help organizations implement social distancing in the workplace. (Buro Happold)

Buro Happold’s analytics group is using IoT sensors and monitoring real people in buildings to understand the hotspots for where social distancing breaks down or is difficult to achieve. This research tells us that the modern workplace is poorly configured for long-term social distancing futures and how to better design workspaces in the future. (Image: Buro Happold).

The emTech at Buro Happold: The highly regarded global engineering firm has tapped its analytics group using real data from IoT senses to feed 3D models powered by algorithms to understand where the modern workplace tends to struggle for social distancing. Red circles indicate a failure while green circles are a pass at maintaining consistent social distancing. The study illustrates that most current workspaces are not structured for long-term social distancing requirements, and also at what types of areas inside these space types tend to be the troubled spots.

Leading engineering and architecture firms with advanced computational design groups, like Buro Happold are conducting internal research to gain a lead on insights useful for current and future practice.

Five More Stories (just for INSIDER Members)

Xpresso readers saw the first five stories above, but annual subscribers to INSIDER Membership gain five more curated stories, plus a deeper (emTech) section (below) we are now calling “(emTech) Section Plus.”

6 – Sidewalk Labs plans to spin out more smart city companies – Last month Sidewalk Labs killed its Toronto smart city project, a project we have mentioned in the past in Xpresso. Privacy advocates railed against the Google subsidiary’s surveillance-capable smart city technologies.

What types of companies?  The skinny on this is that Sidewalk Labs has developed much expertise during its forays in Toronto that it is now able to bundle that expertise in discreet companies. For example, they are in the process of creating a mass timber construction company. Another possible company is focused on affordable electrification. (VentureBeat)

7 – COVID-19: Emerging technologies are now critical infrastructure — what that means for governance.  Emerging technologies (emTech) is what this post and the Xpresso newsletter is primarily focused on, insofar as their impacts on AEC and manufacturing industries. But instead of seeing emTech as being about technologies far off in the future in wide-spread application and usage, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed is that some emTech is vital for just such emergencies today! (WEForum)

What is essential to know? Things like chatbots are emerging technologies that during the massive loads of a pandemic, are coming to the rescue to relieve human workers. IoT and connectivity are showing societies how valuable these technologies are in a time of crisis. 

Countries like Estonia, which is technologically highly developed at both the implementation and policy level, are best prepared for the consequences of a pandemic. A quote: “The country already treats technology like critical infrastructure and could serve as an example for others to follow.” 

8 – The Biggest Robot Companies And Their Most Scary Inventions – This (Forbes) piece reviews some of the biggest robot companies in existence, but the reason I added this story here has to do with its references, in particular to Toyota’s THR-3 robot.

The THR-3 robot by Toyota can be remote-controlled by a human in a motion-capture suit. It is built for multiple roles, including construction, but a larger heavier stronger version could be much more useable in construction settings.

From scary robots to the incredibly useful: The THR-3 is one of the larger humanoid robots I’ve seen. What makes it unique is that it can be controlled by a human wearing a motion-detection (motion capture) suit. We’ve seen motion capture suits drive CGI characters in films, but this is the first time seeing it applied to a robot. One imagines remote workers in larger rooms using motion capture suits to drive the limbs of future THR-3s who are lifting incredibly heavy items on construction sites. Xpresso has already pointed out robots lifting heavy items on construction sites, but the agility and mobility of such equipment (some stay on tracks) is a hindrance to flexible operations. 

9 – Computation as Design: Ron Resch and the New Media of Geometry  –  Andrew Witt (former Director of Research at Gehry Technologies and co-founder of Certain Measures (Boston-Berlin), along with Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, currently Digital Design Consultant at Gehry Technologies, have both co-written an excellent paper on Ron Resch, a pioneer in computational geometry at the University of Utah back in the 1970s. (Harvard)

Who is this for? This is an offer for a deep read of one of the early pioneers of computational design, or what Witt has called one of the first “hackers” in AEC technologies. Resch was an artist, a polymath who did remarkable work foundational to many of today’s technologies. There is a link to the ePub book/paper on Resch, here.

10 – The Intricate Models Behind the RPBW (Renzo Piano Building Workshop) Method  – This story is more a find worthy of reading almost as a counterpoint to the focus of digital technology. It tells the story of model making at Renzo Piano Building Workshop. At RPBW model-making is seen as an essential part of the architectural method. (RPBW)

Interesting facts: model-making from the very start was important at Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Today the company has six full-time professional model-makers at workshops in Paris and Genoa. The article shows detailed photos of these workshops for model-making. Quote: “A bad line on a computer drawing might slip by unseen, but you can’t ‘cheat’ with models. It is only when you construct a model that you can truly see the things that don’t work.”

Computational Design Tool News

Rhino3DMedical is a version of Rhino 3D used for the orthopedics field. It was recently used for the first spine surgery in Brazil. The full story is on the Rhino3d blog here but in summary, Rhino3D Medical software enables 3D models from CT scans and can drive 3D printers to create very accurate medical models.

Rhino3DMedical is Rhino 3D technology for the orthopedic industry.

In the case of the Brazil spinal surgery, the patient had a surgical treatment called, microdiscectomy with transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion. Here’s a brief snippet from the story on Rhino3D blog:

“Soon after the completion of the MRI, we proceeded with the segmentation and 3D rendering of the spine (L3–S1), using Rhino3DMedical. The software is very intuitive to use and allows us to post-process 3D models in a fast and accurate way,” explains Dr. Sampaio.

Robots in Construction

Robot roundup: 5 recent innovations in construction tech – this ConstructionDive report runs through five robot products for the construction industry, including Husky A200, a new rover type of robot. GE Research is also developing a small tunneling robot. (ConstructionDive)

Contech – Prefabrication and Digital Design

Cover is a new Katerra-like construction company focused on home-building. Its founders are under 30 and featured in this Forbes article. Its innovative team members have built such things as automotive production lines, reusable rockets, race cars, and Gmail. Oh, and also $100 plus in modern mansions.

The company’s website says: “We started Cover to make thoughtfully designed and well-built homes for everyone. Homes that are uncompromising in their design and performance, and tailored to each person and property.”

An Instagram image of a Cover home. (Image: screengrab / Architosh.)

Cover is backed by some of the investors who have backed Tesla, SpaceX, Facebook, and Airbnb. Yet, while there is serious firepower behind Cover, just as there is behind Katerra, changing an industry that hasn’t moved much in a century or more isn’t easy. Despite this, the Los Angeles area company has raised $1.6 million in venture funding and can deliver a 400-sq foot pre-fab structure for $120,000 – $160,000, preferably in many cases to backyards where due to a housing shortage, new state regulations are easing the construction of residential units in the backyards of homes.

Architosh Analysis & Commentary: It was well over 12 years ago when I suggested Apple should eventually focus on the home market, bringing its aesthetics and ability to manufacture high-quality products to the market consistently. With software integrations added to the home, Apple could literally crush this market space. The Cover home innovative but its roofline is problematic from this architect’s perspective. Nothing that couldn’t be solved with a modular roof edge detail.

Other Design Market News

Global Interior Design Software Markets 2020 – 2025 expected to grow significantly. The global interior design software was valued at USD 3,829 million in 2019 and expected to reach USD 6,433 million by 2025. Driving growth in this market is improved productivity due to reducing dependency on paperwork and documentation and due to virtual walkthroughs and high-end renderings leading to client conversion and buy-in. (Full report here)

reSITE is a platform for discourse on the urbanized world. Talks, podcasts, stories.

Final Thoughts

5 ways lock down will impact how we design the built environment – a thought piece based on some experimental sprints held at Buro Happold. (Buro Happold)

The skinny: This thoughtful exercise at a globally leading engineering firm produced some great takeaways. Firstly, the “commute” we have all been missing isn’t just a liability but equally an asset. What happens when we commute to work through various ways is we gain serendipity. And serendipity is what we have been missing in our lives. The folks at Buro Happold ask, should the commute be rethought as a type of “play space”? This is just one of the five interesting ideas that came about from this Buro Happold experiment. 

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

AIA – guides on the smart reopening of buildings by building type

Buro Happold

Certain Measures

Cover

Katerra

Sidewalk Labs

THR-3 Robot

RPBW – Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Rhino3DMedical

Closing Notes

Next month we plan to introduce version 1.0 of our Xpresso Reader Glossary and Index

The post Member Access — (emTech) Section Plus for Xpresso #17 appeared first on Architosh.

FOR LONG TERM READERS, you may recall our ToshLetter PDF newsletter from the last decade. Xpresso is the heir apparent to that newsletter, which in hindsight we realize now was actually a sensation that we failed to recognize.

Xpresso is purposely designed to focus on emerging technologies in the CAD industries, whereas ToshLetter was aimed more broadly. We have been learning that Xpresso readers are quite interested in general topics as well, and not just emTech. Duly noted, we continue to evolve the format for this newsletter. Let’s dig in.

The Top Ten Must-Reads

I’ve combed the Internet to find the most interesting, compelling, or controversial stories about the AEC and manufacturing industries, and the social and emerging technological forces at play on both:

1 – Practicing Architecture in a Pandemic, is the title of this New York Times piece featuring Elizabeth Diller of renowned architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. She discusses the challenges facing her practice—one where “usually we work, we draw, we look in each other’s eyes, we argue, we throw things around the room, we make models and break them apart, and somehow stuff gets made…” but unable to meet in groups the struggle is real and felt.  (The New York Times)

What’s the potential upside in this struggle? Diller Scofidio + Renfro is the selected architecture firm tasked with designing the new School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at MIT. The lessons learned from the pandemic may pivot the firm’s approach to how best to develop schools of architecture for a future pandemic. 

2 –  How should L.A. be redesigned for coronavirus? Are doorknobs out? We asked the experts. (Los Angeles Times)

The crux of the problem?   “If you take the great architectural inventions of the 20th century: the airport, the high-rise, the freeway — those are the things that are challenged the most right now,” says Brett Steele, dean of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. “They have great density or they promise movement at high speeds. Those are exactly the things that sit at the crux of the crisis we are going through.”

Is there a conundrum? Speed is tied to economics and competition. It is hard to imagine the forces of speed not acting on the future development of cities and architecture. Though Rem Koolhaus has recently made the point about airports now doing their best to essentially make the path to your plane as circuitous as possible in the name of commerce. And then there is “density”—a new negative for pandemics but a hero for sustainability and the environment. (see: Architosh, “Firm Profile: BOGDAN & VAN BROECK—The Ecology of Densification,” 11 Aug 2015). In short, the architecture and cities of the future will need to balance the demands of speed (economics) and density (ecology) in new ways that mitigate their intrinsic negative attributes in light of pandemics. Certainly, smart cities tech and planning will have much to say about this. (see next story)

3 – How Smart City Planning Could Slow Future Pandemics. This thoughtful piece suggests that the Covid-19 is a chance for us to re-evaluate the ways in which cities are built, maintained, and lived in. (Wired)

What’s the low-down? We are on an urban planet. “The global economy is living and dying by what happens in cities. Sadly, most if not many were not designed or built with transmissible infectious disease—or human health—front of mind.”

4 – AI Transforming The Construction Industry. This piece in Forbes discusses the ways artificial intelligence is being adopted in one of the world’s oldest professions. (Forbes)

What is essential in this story? The construction industry is realizing that for small-scale projects humans may be capable of managing complicated schedules and processes, but for large, multi-year projects, the kind that overwhelms humans when too many moving parts, delays, plan changes and unexpected delays through projects into chaos, artificial intelligence (AI) assistance may just be the what doctor ordered to bring control back into the process.  

5 – Architecture and Design has a piece on 6 practices bringing AI into architecture.  I wanted to share this piece because it brought up Stanislas Chaillou’s research in AI and architecture again. We covered Chaillou’s Harvard GSD thesis in AI in a past issue of Xpress. (A&D)

AI Build is a London-based startup focused on AI-based digital and autonomous construction systems. (Image: screenshot of AI Build website)

And other finds? While this article also touched the use of emerging technologies (emTech) in firms like 3XN and its research division GXN (we discussed this firm in a previous Xpresso newsletter) it brought to my attention AI Build, a London-based startup producing autonomous construction systems. Says the article above, recently, they teamed up with ARUP Engineers to create the Daedalus Pavilion, a 5×5 meter latticework.

6 – Exploring Potentials of AI in Revolutionizing Architecture. This short article, by a leading publication focused on AI, Big Data, and analytics, offers the more prevailing view that architecture, while highly subject to the forces of automation, is less likely to be radically eliminated by AI. Oxford researchers on AI suggest, “…even with AI coming into the scene, the essential value of architects as professionals who can understand and evaluate a problem and synthesize unique and insightful solutions will likely remain unchallenged.” (Analytics Insight)

Will this thesis on AI in architecture hold? It is hard to imagine the disappearance of architects at the scale expressed by Sebastian Errazuriz—who we mention below. However, one when one looks at technologies like GenDes—also discussed below—it is difficult to argue the virtues of powerful tools like Sidewalk Labs’ GenDes and similar parametric, AI, infused tools and tackling large problems with vast parameters that can all be “weighted” according to an architect, owner, user-community algorithm. (see Computational Design Tools News, below)

7 – Rise of artificial intelligence means architects are “doomed” says Sebastian Errazuriz, who is a New York-based designer who warned that 90 percent of architects will lose their jobs in the end to AI. The prediction is actually from last Fall and was made on his Instagram account. Stating, “It’s almost impossible for you to compete” with algorithms…adding: “The thing is you’re not that special.” (Dezeen)

Delusion or Reality? Most studies in AI’s impact suggest that the field of architecture is one of the most insular from suffering from automation. Errazuriz has a history of making noise, but is it signal? His Instagram post showcased an animation of a parametric tool developed by Wallgren Arkitekter and BOX Bygg. The tool in question is Finch, which was slated to arrive in 2020 as a plugin to the visual programming tool Grasshopper and Rhino. It still appears to be in beta. Will architects really be replaced by artificial intelligence? That was a question we delved into with six experts on the subject in the first issue of Xpresso, (see: “Pondering the Impact of AI (artificial intelligence in AEC Industries—the Wide View,” Xpresso #01). 

8 – U Penn students control robots remotely to complete semester work.  At the University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design, students in Ezio Blasetti’s course, Computational Composite Form Computational Fiber Robotic fabrication seminar completed their work remotely due to the pandemic. (Archinect)

U Penn’s Weitzman School of Design’s Robotics Lab supports work by the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab. (Image: screenshot of U. Penn. Graduate Architecture resources page.)

A sign of the future? A quick adaption and the help of remote access tools provided by Dropbox saved the day. Lessons? For sure, remote access technology is more important than ever and so are tools that allow remote control of laboratory equipment like robotic arms and 3D printers. 

9 – Engineering Considerations for Your Return to Work, is a technical report from CannonDesign, one of the US’s top architecture firms. This is a fantastic short report that serves as an excellent service message to all employers and employees. (Cannon Design)

10 – The US is gaining a $12 billion new chip plant that may signal a shift in high-tech ITC manufacturing in America. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (aka: TSMC) is not only the world’s largest chipmaker but one of just three in the world that can produce the most advanced CPUs and other chips at a fab process 10 nanometers or smaller. (MIT Technology Review)

What’s does this mean? TSMC makes chips for Apple and Huawei, two big rivals in smartphones globally. But the latter is on a US Department of Commerce list of companies banned from receiving technology from US companies without a special license. While this story is focused on US-China relations and tensions over IP, the presence of an American TSMC plant may prove pivotal for Apple which may wish to exercise tighter control over future A-series chips. However, that may take years as the American planned plant is expected to make 5-nanometer chips first, not the cutting-edge 3-nanometer and smaller. 

Computational Design Tool News

Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary focused on urban development and building showcased a generative design tool the company was developing last December (2019). That tool is discussed and showcased in the video and images below.

Sidewalk Labs has several new products that folks can “pilot” including its Generative Design tools (GenDes). (Image: screenshot of Sidewalk Labs’ website)

While Sidewalk Labs’ website still says the tool, called GenDes, is coming soon, they are taking people’s email, name, and other information for those expressing interest in GenDes.

After watching the video below, you may want to sign-up here, so you can possibly get an early chance to evaluate this type of design tool.

Rediscovering Flux: Lessons for generative design software. This article over at Parametric Monkey, discusses Flux’s history of software development. What makes it interesting is Paul Wintour’s smart observations about why various efforts at Flux failed, starting with its Flux Metro software project which focused on the city of Austin’s zoning code and visualized all the myriad data inside that code.

Further Commentary: At the time Flux Metro was around, I was highly involved with a Boston-Providence area startup (Simulicity) and the SIM team was quite intrigued by this big bet the Google startup was making. 

As Wintour astutely notes, zoning codes are famously irregular, quirky, and also not machine-readable. This made Flux Metro not scalable. Flux would then pivot and come out with Flux apps and these two would fail. Now the company pivoted again in the digital twins direction with HelixRE.  Read on here. 

Construction emTech News

Advancing Automation in Construction. This company blog post by Brasfield & Gorrie discusses advancements in machine control automation in building site excavation.

So how does it work? Machine control users design models and GPS to position earthwork machinery. 3D models, AutoCAD files, and GPS data are fed into a piece of equipment. 

This U.S. construction firm is raising buildings via drone. This Verizon corporate story discusses Birmingham, Ala-based Brasfield & Gorrie again, this time talking about the tech-forward construction company’s use of drone operations to improve their overall construction operations.

Digital twins to play a bigger role in post-pandemic construction. This ConstructionDive brief makes the point that with data intrinsic to a digital twin, architects could better plan for social distancing in both new and existing structures.

What is the impact? Digital twins are not simply BIM models loaded with data, but rather a collection of models and textural information all intelligently linked together to provide an up-to-date virtual twin of a physical asset. The digital twins market today is worth $3.8 billion but will rapidly increase to $36 billion by 2025. That’s a 9x fold increase! 

What’s Cooking: Future Xpresso Features

One of our features coming up on Xpresso before it arrives on Architosh is on Autodesk-based firm, Stamhuis of the Netherlands. A retail specialist, Stamhuis designs and builds out entire stores in record times.

A Stamhuis developed store created and designed using automated processes in Dynamo with Revit.

The company is innovative and constantly evaluating ways to streamline its processes, at both the design, manufacturer, and erection phases. To streamline their design workflows in Autodesk Revit, the company has recently adopted customized Dynamo scripts that build a design for a new store in minutes, one conforming to numerous programmatic requirements and design standards.

We look forward to sharing this story in Xpresso #17 in July.

Issue Index

I have mentioned the following companies and solutions in this issue (see above):

3XN – architecture design firm

Autodesk Revit – BIM software tool

Dynamo – visual scripting algorithms-aided design (AAD) tool

Finch – a next-gen generative design tool

GXN – 3XN’s digital research lab

GenDes – Sidewalk Labs’ parametric AI design tool

HelixRE – AECO digital data services company

Parametric Monkey – Australian based consultancy specializing in AAD and BIM

Sidewalk Labs – a digital data-driven design innovator

Simulicity – AECO digital data and “design expertise” services company

Closing Notes

This is the first Early Access+ report feature on the (emTech) section of the upcoming INSIDER Xpresso #16. Xpresso is our free monthly newsletter focused on emerging technologies in AEC and manufacturing industries.

Upcoming Bonus! In the near future, INSIDER Members will gain another exclusive: an exhaustive glossary and index to every release of our Xpresso newsletter. We will index all issues, all companies, all products and services, sources of knowledge and insight. In short, everything written about in Xpresso will be indexed.

The post Early Access(+): (emTech) section for INSIDER Xpresso—newsletter #16 appeared first on Architosh.

What You Will Find Inside

The INSIDER brand is meant to signify our best CAD industry journalism and the reports we want our readers to focus on the most. Just as our INSIDER Xpresso brand—in the form of our monthly newsletter—brings exclusive and leading-edge information that readers may not know about, our annual INSIDER Reports feature information and technologies that our readers may not know even existed or were coming.

Most architects are not yet computational design tool users. But AAD tools are becoming critical dimensions to the AEC professional’s workflow. We hope readers find this year’s annual report interesting and valuable. We always love it when you let us know.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction — A Focus on AAD (algorithms-aided design) in Architecture
• How JPW is using Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents to Push the Edge of Practice with Technology
• Hypar Looks to Unlock AEC Industry Expertise via Computational Design Ecosystem
• Expanding a BIM Workflow Near You—McNeel’s New Open Source Rhino.Inside SDK
• Ladybug Tools Aim to Take Environmental Analysis to a Wider Audience
• A Brief Tour of Select Grasshopper Add-Ons

The introduction listed on the report cover graphic in this article (show below) is what you are reading here.

architosh INSIDER Report #03 – focuses on AAD technologies in architecture.

To get a bigger look at the cover graphic click on the image directly above you. Its image pertain to the JPW feature and to the listing of GH plugins in our final feature in the series.

Rhino.Inside

For those readers who are subscribers to our INSIDER Xpresso monthly newsletter, you have already had a chance to read one of the features below on McNeel’s new ‘Rhino.Inside’ SDK developments with particular focus and importance on what that means for Autodesk Revit users but beyond that what Robert McNeel and Daniel Belcher reveal about the technology inside Rhino.Inside itself.

“Expanding a BIM Workflow Near You—McNeel’s New Open Source Rhino.Inside SDK,” takes the reader into the stunning developments behind how McNeel’s developers are creating a way for any BIM/CAD tool to essentially run Rhino + Grasshopper inside that host application’s memory space. Importantly, Rhino.Inside means Grasshopper everywhere—the ability to bring the most popular AAD tool to any BIM platform. Indeed, as one learns in the article, Rhino.Inside is a technology that is likely coming to every single major BIM platform, besides the ones it already is connected to now, at some point in the near future.

Of course, there are catches and complexities. Does Rhino.Inside technology work across platforms? How will Rhino.Inside affect tools like ARCHICAD which already have a bi-directional workflow with Rhino + Grasshopper? What about all the plugins…will they work and come over also? These are some of the great questions answered in this feature. This story is the most detailed information published anywhere on Rhino.Inside technology and we actually have more information to share in a future report headed for Xpresso next in May so be sure to sign-up.

Ladybug and Honeybee. Meet Pollination Cloud

Another feature with information you cannot find anywhere is our in-depth story on the folks behind Ladybug Tools. Founders Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari and Chris Mackey do a deep dive with Architosh on what the future holds for their industry-leading building and environmental analysis plugins for Grasshopper.

In this feature we learn about Pollination Cloud, the company’s efforts to bring their Ladybug Tools to the cloud and therefore to bring them both to much larger scales and to other platforms. For those not familiar with Ladybug and Honeybee, both do solar radiation and analysis and simulation and provide architects with actionable insights early in the design stage. The really exciting part of this story is how their technologies have been rewritten in the [+] Project to enable them to be accessible from many more platforms; they are no longer limited to just Grasshopper as a computational design platform but accessible both from the cloud and from within other applications on multiple platforms. Readers will definitely want to take in “Ladybug Tools Aim to Take Computational Design and Analysis to a Wider Audience.” 

Unlocking AEC Industry Expertise

Co-founder of Hypar, Anthony Hauck, has spoken to Architosh in the past about his company’s exciting approach to the transmission and democratization of “computational design” and industry expertise. In this second major feature of the company, we learn even more about Hypar’s latest developments.

While on one sense we note the strength of Grasshopper’s dominance in the industry in the feature on Rhino.Inside, in this feature, Anthony Hauck makes a compelling case for why those plugin developers may want to bring their AAD tools expertise to the Hypar platform. But more than that, he also makes the compelling case that firms without computational designers are already sitting on hard-earned industry expertise that lends itself to encoding into AAD tools like those on Hypar. Our feature “Hypar Looks into Unlocking AEC Industry Expertise via Computational Design Ecosystem,” paints a vision of how industry expertise can be more widely shared, globally distributed, and benefitted from lessons from the open-source software world.

Hypar seems radical in the same way iPhone apps seemed radical when Apple first introduced the iPhone. And this author tends to believe that a future of “comp apps” or “AAD apps,” easily accessible in atomized and interchangeable components, is an incredibly smart idea.

The JPW Case Study

Our fourth feature to talk about is our case study on Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW) of Australia, a mid-sized, award-winning architecture firm currently overseeing the construction of the largest commercial structure in the country down under. Hired by both the developer and then eventually the contractor, JPW is doing innovative things with Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC).

This story was brought to this author’s attention in Singapore at the 2019 Bentley Year in Infrastructure Awards while attending as an industry juror for the awards program. Impressed by the practical and creative utilization of GenerativeComponents (GC) technology inside of Bentley’s BIM solution—now named OpenBuildings Designer—it felt critical to share this story with Architosh’s readers.

Tour of Grasshopper Add-Ons

“A Brief Tour of Select Grasshopper Add-Ons,” is a feature that runs through a list of 35 Grasshopper plugin add-ons. We list which ones are available for the Mac version of Rhino + Grasshopper and there are quite a few, though admittedly the Windows platform is where users want to be if they are doing very advanced GH work.

We hope you enjoy this issue of our annual report, now to be delivered in Q1 of each new year. — ANTHONY FRAUSTO-ROBLEDO, AIA, LEED AP. Editor-in-Chief.

The post INSIDER: Introduction—A Focus on AAD (algorithms-aided design) in Architecture appeared first on Architosh.

Naturally, you may wonder how? How does this expertise get formalized into a digital tool that you can use, that others can use, particularly one that is optimized at multiple levels of use, deployment, speed, and power?

This is where Hypar comes in. The company is setting up an AAD (algorithms-aided design) platform and ecosystem that aims to help AECO companies unlock, democratize, and deploy their expertise—at scale! These companies range from architecture and engineering firms, real estate and development professionals, to folks on the manufacturing and design-to-fabrication side of the industry. No matter where you sit in the industry, you have “pain points” that your side of the industry has been living with since you entered it. Who in the industry doesn’t wish to change that?

Well, it turns out many do. And folks are tapping the power of computational design tools, or AAD tools, to transform their workflows and solve age-old problems at multiple factors faster than previous methods or embed their hard-won specialized expertise, often enshrined in Excel spreadsheets, into 3D visuals and KPI’s they often hold close to their chest.

Hypar’s Mission

Hypar’s founders believe that after 5000 years of building the world, no AECO project should start from a blank page. With that in mind, they have created a web-based platform for generating buildings using encoded expertise in the form of algorithms-aided design (AAD) functions. You may ask: who is providing the basic functions?

A view of the latest Hypar user-interface where users have access to common functions provided as part of the base system, plus all the AAD functions they uploaded themselves and shared by other users.

The Hypar development team wrote a core group of functions called “common” functions. All other functions are written by developers who are “users” of the Hypar platform. Basic functions in the common set include things like fitting a building to a given site context, determining that building’s shell and core design, and essential facade generator tools and more.

So far, industry reaction to Hypar has been measured yet excited. This makes sense; AAD tools in the AEC industry are still adopted by architecture firms in the single-digit percentages of all practices. Still, reaction at Autodesk University, where Architosh last saw Hypar, was very solid with many curious to understand what this cool-sounding company was all about.

How Hypar Works

So how exactly does Hypar work?

First and foremost, this is a system for distributed (SaaS-based) computational design. It means through the web browser folks can solve problems—a whole array of them—through the Hypar platform and ecosystem of solutions.

Hypar functions are highly specific, atomic to the overall processes of AECO workflows, and able to interlock into sequences of other functions to build up functional solution paths.

Hypar’s AAD-based functions come in three classes. The “common functions” are available to all monthly subscribers. Think about the new Disney+ video service where you get all the Disney classics as part of your set monthly subscription. Same idea. These common functions are supplied by Hypar and by any other “contributors” who choose to make their functions available to all Hypar subscribers.

Another class of functions is “your functions,” the ones your company has crafted exclusively for their use but distributed through the Hypar platform. These functions could be developed by in-house developers, external developers, or the Hypar development team, but they encapsulate your expertise reignited through new computational design tools.

Finally, the third class of functions is “those written by software firms” who have chosen Hypar as a pathway to market. “We have had several software development companies talking to us,” says Anthony Hauck, “for a while folks like TestFit have experimented with the platform, just to find out what it would be like to put their building shell generator on Hypar.”

Hypar has free developer tools to aid in bringing over encoded expertise into the Hypar platform and ecosystem. Currently, the system supports just C# but is planning to expand to Python, Grasshopper, Dynamo, Excel, and Revit families.

Hauck has said, Hypar is one approach to the market. “Hypar isn’t just for people who want to put together lists of functions and make something from them, or even just for people who want to write functions from scratch, but also for software companies interested in going to the Web on a very easy path.” For that, Hypar has its own set of free development tools, so developers and scripters of AAD solutions can get started quite easily.

But Why Hypar?

There are many arguments for the Hypar proposition, but here is one that may make the most sense to the largest group of AECO users if they could stop being so overcautious about it: deploy one’s expertise by encoding it into “computational design” and decision support tools.

“We see a lot of organizations trying to normalize and distribute their expertise internally,” says Hauck, “a lot of times the vehicle is simply Excel. One or two experts will record that expertise in a spreadsheet, and they will distribute it by either sending a link to it on the network or by email—and you can imagine the update nightmare that attends that procedure—but that’s what they do.”

A view looking at structural functions inside of Hypar.

Real estate development professionals, in particular, have decades of proprietary expertise, often localized to various markets or client group types. While the numbers help them with key decision support, there is often zero graphical representation 2D or 3D that attends this data. This is a natural shortcoming of that is easily fixable, says Hauck. There are already specific AAD tools sprouting up that address the pre-design stages of the building industry. Still, those tools don’t necessarily allow professionals and companies to encode their specific expertise in a way that keeps that expertise private. Hauck says that Hypar never gets any source code at all. “If someone shares a function to the Hypar platform, what we get is a compiled DLL.”

As readers know, some AECO companies already have their computational design professionals creating bespoke tools. “I’m talking to an engineer about the use of our platform, and he says they are very good at engineering big box stores,” says Hauck. “And what that means is they tie up a PE on a big box store that is nearly exactly the same as all the other big box stores they do, even if for multiple clients. So they are looking at how do they automate MEP design tasks so their PEs can free up time for more interesting and often more lucrative work?”

At Autodesk University 2019, there was a session on Hypar by an MEP firm that was using it for its engineering workflows. This is the type of firm that is tired of not doing anything about age-old pain points in existent AEC workflows and has finally decided to invest the time to do something about it.

Hypar’s Ecosystem Argument

Hypar is both a platform and an ecosystem. One side of the Hypar equation is about using AAD-based functions as an end-user, solving your building industry problems. The other side is about uploading your AAD-based functions for distribution to others. “Others” can be your company colleagues, business partners, clients, or anybody else on the Hypar platform. The system is designed to encourage sharing.

“We have a structure that encourages openness among contributors,” says Hauck. “If you want to expose your content to everyone who is a subscriber on Hypar, and you expose your code on Github, everything is free to you. Anywhere in between, you are paying for various degrees for privacy.” Hauck and his co-founder Ian Keough haven’t yet finalized their pricing model, but Hauck describes it has a mashup of Amazon Prime, plus Github, plus the Apple App Store.

An image looking at the Facade generator functions in the base core set. Hypar believes world-class architecture firms with AAD expertise will develop their own facade generators, as will manufactures, to help architects design to specific situations and systems.

If you are a big company that wants to use Hypar to distribute your encoded expertise in computational design—say to your global offices—but not expose your code on Github, the fee may be USD 10 per month to host five functions. And Hauck says it scales from there, but “things get cheaper if you share more.” The goal is to get companies and individuals to share their functions, creating a vast ecosystem of targeted computational design tools for the benefit of the entire AECO community.

For software firms and others—like industry-leading three-letter architecture firms—who want to share their computational design expertise for a fee, Hypar is developing a financial model as well. “Suppose somebody comes up with a much better facade creator than the “common” function for that,” adds Hauck, “if they want to charge a per-use or subscription fee for that, we will be supportive of that model also.”

Hypar—Looking Forward

The Hypar vision is compelling as a democratized vision, but industry incumbents may be wary. Today computational design use currently resides in multiple leading AAD toolchains such as Rhino + Grasshopper, Bentley’s Generative Components tied into OpenBuildings Designer, or Marionette tied in Vectorworks Architect, or Dynamo and its strong connection to Revit. Part of Hypar’s challenge is not just competing with those tools but convincing those who already hold encoded expertise across those platforms to place their algorithmic-aided design (AAD) functions on Hypar, to bring them into the world as web services.

To get there, Hypar needs to support more forms of encoded expertise. “We see in our industry, five or maybe six areas where repositories of building expertise reside,” says Hauck. He is specifically talking about this expertise residing inside codes or scripts developed in different languages. They include in alphabetical order: C#, Dynamo, Excel, Grasshopper, Python, and Revit families. Hauck says, “We intend to make all of those a part of the Hypar ecosystem in the future.”

For now, in the immediate roadmap, Excel contains a massive amount of encoded industry expertise, and Hauck says they intend to link Hypar to Excel in the very near future. By linking in Excel, Hypar can target a lot of expertise in the pre-design areas of the building industry, as well as a vast array of industry knowledge in building typology planning expertise.

As for the grand scale potential of industry expertise? Hauck says he is talking to a lot of CEOs and telling them that the market for that expertise is tremendous and that few folks can tap that expertise. The vast majority of architects do not have computational design capacities of any kind, nor do they realize how to use such tools for their problems. Yet, in most cases, they are sitting on expertise nonetheless.

The post INSIDER: Hypar Looks to Unlock AEC Industry Expertise via Computational Design Ecosystem appeared first on Architosh.

Despite this, and partly to address it, global elite marquee architecture firms have long adopted the most advanced 3D modeling technology, from Gehry’s Digital Project to the much more pervasive Rhino 3D with its attendant Grasshopper “algorithms-aided design” (AAD) environment. In fact, “computational design” (another generalized term for AAD) has evolved since the early aughts from being a designer’s new “BFF” for form-making to today’s pathway to 1:1 digitally-driven prototyping.

While this nearly two-decade evolution has happened, something else has transpired in AEC: BIM has become standard practice for large and mid-sized architecture firms around the world. And in that process, Autodesk has taken up a notable market leadership position, at least in the United States.

Why Rhino.Inside

Thus the problem of how to get Rhino 3D models to have a longer, more fruitful, and continued existence through the BIM-centric stages of today’s typical AEC workflow.

Rhino.Inside is an open-source technology that embeds Rhino+Grasshopper inside another application’s memory space. (image: McNeel / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“Part of the reason we started playing with this,” says Bob McNeel, “is there has always been this workflow process where a lot of conceptual work is done in Rhino, and then when the project mature enough detailing and documentation starts in the BIM product of choice.” McNeel makes the point that the geometry coming out of Rhino can often be too complex to be easily ingested by the BIM product.

Dan Belcher of McNeel says that for years now, Revit and Rhino users have had at least seven different ways to hack in Rhino and GH geometry into Revit, but hacking up solutions is painful. Rhino.Inside for Revit—which functions as an add-on to Revit, like any other add-on to Revit—links up Rhino and GH (short for Grasshopper) APIs (application programming interfaces) with Revit APIs.

“Now, in this present situation, you have a Rhino file open. You can set up a GH definition for a particular project or piece you are interested in, and you can push them as native objects directly into Revit,” says McNeel. “And once that is set up, you can go back and make changes in Rhino and rerun the definition.”

But Rhino.Inside is about a lot more than just round-tripping geometry.

Grasshopper Everywhere

Rhino.Inside is a family of open-source host application plugins that interact with Rhino. (Rhino.Inside Revit, Rhino.Inside Excel, etc.)

While McNeel has put the initial efforts into it based around the AEC industry needs of Rhino and Revit users, advanced users and third-parties are free to explore its potential uses. Thus far, folks are working with Rhino.Inside for AutoCAD, Rhino.Inside for Excel, Rhino.Inside for Unity, and other Rhino.Inside projects. Plus, Autodesk’s BIM rivals like Bricsys have already demonstrated Rhino.Inside technology in their BricsCAD BIM solution at its last annual conference, held in Sweden. (see: Architosh, “BRICSYS 2019—Lift Creativity, Reduce Complexity, Act as One,” 30 Oct 2019)

Part of what makes Rhino.Inside really exciting to many folks is the Grasshopper side of the story. Rhino.Inside is equally “Grasshopper.Inside”—inside of the host application you plan to integrate it with. In other words, the host application can gain a computational design (or AAD) canvas whereby Grasshopper components can be written to speak to the specific types of 3D objects or elements in the host application.

Well before Rhino.Inside, both Tekla and ARCHICAD had already developed deep Grasshopper integrations with their respective platforms,” adds McNeel. “Rhino.Inside will just make this easier for others to follow.”

GRAPHISOFT’s Rhino-Grasshopper-ARCHICAD connection is a bi-directional link between all three programs that brings algorithmic design deep into the BIM workflow.

In the case of McNeel’s work with Revit, “We are just adding componentry to GH that is aware of the Revit SDK that knows how to manipulate native Revit objects in the way Revit likes,” says McNeel, “directly through the SDK like if you had written something in Python or done something in Dynamo. The code for these Revit-aware Grasshopper components is open-source so that architects can use them as a starting point for more specific workflows.”

Towards a Diverse Ecosystem

The popularity of Rhino and Grasshopper means that there is a vast ecosystem of best-in-class plugin tools for both Rhino and GH, unrivaled by any other computational design platform. Food4Rhino is a critical source for accessing this ecosystem. There are over 365 tools for Grasshopper alone.

When a host application incorporates Rhino.Inside, they gain not just Grasshopper but the entire ecosystem of plugins for the Rhino + GH world. McNeel also adds that Rhino can read and write 40 different CAD industry file formats, and those capabilities also come over to the host application, significantly expanding its capabilities.

Rhino.Inside for Unity is another example of Rhino.Inside technology inside a host application.

But the big news about this expansion via Rhino.Inside of other apps—particularly other AEC design applications—is those third-party developers have an exploding “addressable market” for these plugins and add-ons for Rhino and GH.

How does a BIM platform compete with other BIM platforms if other BIM platforms can bring inside not only Rhino 3D’s powerhouse modeling but the most popular AAD tool in Grasshopper and the entire ecosystem of plugins written for it?

I asked Bob McNeel this question. “I think just about every AEC tool has a connection to Rhino and/or GH, or, will soon, now that Rhino.Inside makes it so much easier,” he says, in speaking about the BIM world’s key players. But Revit isn’t the first BIM application to get Rhino and GH inside. The first company was GRAPHISOFT with ARCHICAD, one of Revit’s stronger market challengers. And they did it using different techniques.

Rhino.Inside for Esri ArcGIS is another example of Rhino.Inside technology inside a host application.

GRAPHISOFT integrated Rhino and Grasshopper into ARCHICAD several versions and years ago, and the integration keeps getting more productive. McNeel says GRAPHISOFT’s pathway for this integration was to set up a communication pipeline, one that works in both directions. “So they basically have to expose individual functions that can talk to Rhino or talk to Grasshopper and then add an equivalent thing on the other side,” says McNeel.

Rhino.Inside—A Tech Dive

Rhino.Inside is an open-source technology that embeds Rhino + Grasshopper inside another application’s memory space. It runs only on 64-bit Windows machines (more on this limitation below). Belcher notes you can also load Rhino.Inside in C Python so that you can be calling into Rhino itself from Python. “It could be very interesting to the scientific programming community or anybody writing hardcore Python code where a geometry kernel is needed,” says Belcher.

Rhino.Inside for Unreal Engine is another example of Rhino.Inside technology inside a host application.

Rhino.Inside links up the SDKs of host applications to the SDK for Rhino + Grasshopper. By doing that, you expose each set of SDKs to the user, and data naturally flows between Rhino, Grasshopper, and the host application in a bi-direction way, based on the way the host application ideally wants it. As noted earlier, in the case of Revit, you can bring in the Rhino ecosystem into Revit. “So now you can extend everything that Revit does, for example, on the host application, with everything that third-party applications do inside of Rhino,” says McNeel.

As powerful as this sounds for the host application, there is one big catch: it only runs on Windows.

Not everyone has that limitation. GRAPHISOFT does not. “They have the advantage that their solution is also cross-platform,” says McNeel. Belcher also says they have another advantage in the BIM market—”they have done a lot of the hard work of figuring out what are the useful components in GH to an ARCHICAD user.”

For some host applications with large or exclusively Mac-based user bases, they will face two paths: either do what GRAPHISOFT did or take the open-source code base for Rhino.Inside and port it to work on Mac. Belcher and McNeel didn’t mention if anybody will do that, but they did say why they are limiting Rhino.Inside today for Windows.

“We have a limited amount of people who understand how architecturally things work on Mac,” says Bob McNeel. “It’s basically a different engineering problem, which means some different expertise on our side. And we don’t have that depth of expertise.”

But there are many CAD and BIM companies that do have that expertise—chief among them the two Nemetschek stalwart BIM providers GRAPHISOFT and Vectorworks. It’s not clear if Nemetschek companies will be the first to help take Rhino.Inside cross-platform, or if those companies will formulate more liberal optional paths, particularly since one of those companies (Vectorworks) already has its own AAD toolset. We don’t know that today—and another strong Mac software company may port it over instead—and we also don’t know when McNeel will invest in those resources to take Rhino.Inside to Mac itself. They have not ruled that out; they just don’t know when that might be.

What we are sure of today is the Rhino.Inside technology is exciting users across the BIM spectrum and beyond and looking at how to further democratize AAD workflows from the earliest stages to the end stages of the AEC delivery cycle.

The post INSIDER: Expanding a BIM Workflow Near You—McNeel’s New Open Source Rhino.Inside SDK appeared first on Architosh.

Architosh readers may recall Chris Mackey’s name from our 2018 Firm Profile feature on Boston architecture practice Payette, which won the coveted AIA Firm of the Year Award in 2019. Just before the recent holidays, I spoke with both of them about the exciting developments with Ladybug Tools LLC and about the state of computational design in general.

MORE: Bespoke Computational Tools at Payette Drive Unforeseen Values to Firm and Client Alike

Before we jump into the interview, we should acquaint the reader with the full spectrum of software available under the Ladybug Tools company banner. Ladybug Tools started with Ladybug first and we’ll get to that story in a moment in the interview. Ladybug provides an analysis of climate data for its impact on building design. Honeybee goes further to model the inside of the structure by supporting daylight simulations, energy models, and envelope heat flow. Butterfly is aimed at computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations, while Dragonfly analyzes large-scale climate phenomena like urban heat island effects. There are a few other tools and planned new “insects”—all their tools are named after them—but these four are the base.

The core software tools by Ladybug Tools include these shown above: Ladybug and Honeybee being the oldest and most popular environmental simulation and analysis tools used in AEC via, traditionally the Grasshopper AAD platform. (image: Ladybug Tools LLC / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Now that you are familiar with their products, here’s the interesting good news: they are free! These computational design tools, or what we at Architosh often refer to as AAD (algorithms-aided design) tools, are free to download and install and use on your own. You may ask, how does a software company give away all their stuff and manage to feed itself? That’s a great question, and we will get to that because that question is central to perhaps the AAD movement in general and, in particular, has importance to what is happening with a great variety of tools in the AEC market in general.

Let’s get to the interview because there is a lot of important stuff going on at Ladybug Tools.

The Interview

(Anthony Frausto-Robledo) I want to talk briefly about Ladybug Tools and how it came into existence because I think it’s kind of a classic startup story and a not so classic startup story. After all, as a group, you, Chris, and collaborators have been at it for years. Now you are officially moving to provide commercial services, as you mention on your website. What drove that?

(Mostapha)  I created the Ladybug Tools plugins to solve things I needed to solve on a daily basis. Once I released them, they became so popular I needed to change my job in order to keep up with it. I changed my job twice, and then eventually, I realized it was just bigger than something I could handle on the side.

We started the company to sell services like consulting around Ladybug Tools. Then last year, we applied for a grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a cloud service called Pollination Cloud. It became clear that we have reached the limitations of a desktop application and it is time to take the next step forward. The initial goal was to run simulations at scale but it ended up being much more than that. Pollination Cloud is the platform for building, sharing, and executing environmental building simulations. We call it the “GitHub for Building Simulation.”

Now, Chris, you were working at Payette doing some interesting bespoke development at one of the nation’s top architecture firms combining building science and custom software development. Besides wanting to do this full time, what is different about this development than the bespoke development inside a firm?

(Chris)  There is a real difference between developing bespoke solutions for individual projects in a firm like Payette versus what we are providing with Ladybug Tools. (see: Architosh, “Bespoke Computational Tools at Payette Drive Unforeseen Values to Firm and Client Alike,” 5 Feb 2018). A good software ecosystem has a strong foundation, like a strong tree trunk holding up many large branches. The main pitfall of bespoke development, even at a firm like Payette, is that you are so focused on addressing the specific needs of individual projects (the “tree branches”) that you don’t get enough time to make this strong reusable foundation. So, from project to project, teams tend to rebuild code elements that should be ready and deployable. What we want to do here with Ladybug Tools is build this strong trunk.

Chris Mackey’s analogy of the tree with a strong truck and foundation of roots. Ladybug Tools is focused on building this strong trunk. (image: Ladybug Tools LLC / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Speaking of Ladybug Tools, before we jump into Pollination Cloud—the most interesting thing you guys are focused on now—I want to introduce the basics of Ladybug tools to the reader. What do Ladybug and Honeybee do and what are some of the other tools?

(Mostapha) Ladybug is for weather data analysis, the simulations it runs are very simple and it is most useful for building massing studies. As soon as you want to get inside the building that is where Honeybee comes in.

I understand they both do solar radiation analysis and simulation. 

Yes, but when you do radiation analysis in Ladybug it doesn’t include the reflection between surfaces—Honeybee does. Ladybug is for quick studies when you as an architect or engineer don’t know about the materials yet. Honeybee lets you get into those types of details.

A theoretical design process and Ladybug Tools applied at different stages of the process. (click on image for larger view). (image: Ladybug Tools LLC / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

People like to see them in order. Like you start with Ladybug, then use Honeybee for daylight, then energy and finally Butterfly when you get closer to the end of the project. I’m fine with that but in reality, the project needs are not linear and questions come up based on project needs. These slides show how a project manager thinks Ladybug Tools will be used and how a design/engineering team uses it during the design process. (images above and below)

Design process in practice and where Ladybug Tools can fit. (image: Ladybug Tools LLC / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

What was the [+] Project about, is that about Pollination Cloud?

That was about taking all the code out and rewriting it from scratch to make it easier for contributors to aid in the code development process. It was also about making it cross-platform by separating the geometry dependencies from the core libraries. The core code is now outside of Grasshopper, which means you can use it in other places, including Pollination Cloud.

So you won this grant from the DOE to do this cloud initiative called Pollination Cloud. Great name by the way. Is this bringing Ladybug tools to the web as a web service? 

Thanks! I know people think about it as Ladybug Tools in the cloud but it is not just Ladybug Tools in the cloud. We have a new platform and language agnostic scheme to describe building geometry and properties, so regardless of how you have generated your model, you can just take that model, make automatic edits to it using the CLI+API of our core libraries, run it through any of the simulation engines we support, and get the results. In the future, we want to add better result visualization and analytics but the first step is making sure that everyone has access to building environmental simulations that can run at scale.

We have also created a platform-agnostic workflow language: Queenbee (see it on GitHub here). The goal is to write reusable workflows that can be shared between different platforms for execution. This ensures that we create reusable workflows “together” instead of having several half-baked workflows. We started this in Honeybee with the concept of recipes but Queenbee workflows are written in YAML which makes them readable to both programmers and non-programmers. I presented the idea during the last International Radiance Workshop. (see presentation slides here).

(Chris) Our codebase is now portable and we can run on different operating systems including Mac and Linux. Originally it was written using IronPython and could only be run within Rhino on Windows systems but it is now CPython. This means apps we build with this code will be able to run on servers in the cloud and can be made accessible to a wider audience.

So distribution through the Internet extends the democratization process? 

We are moving towards more accessibility. That is the main goal. Similar to what GitHub did for software developers. It’s about developing the right tools for the community of experts to make a “smart room” of people rather than a solitary genius. We have experts in the community helping people over the world and our goal is to make the knowledge of these experts accessible to more people through our tools.

What about the performance and technical benefits of moving your tools to a cloud architecture platform? 

Continued on page 2

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In this brief article, we briefly discuss 35 Grasshopper plugins and what they essentially provide to the Rhino + Grasshopper user community. They are organized by category and we provide information on which plugins say, or we could confirm, work on both the Windows and Mac versions of Rhino + Grasshopper. Importantly, many entries in the Food4Rhino page can be incorrect in which plugins do or do not work on the Mac versions of Grasshopper. Lastly, we provide links and a direct link to a web page by the developer if one such exists.

Environmental Analysis and Simulation

Ladybug Tools — Ladybug and Honeybee are the most important open-source environmental analysis plugins for GH (Grasshopper) but if you really want to learn a lot about them and where the actual developers are going with these technologies, read our feature INSIDER article. ( See, Architosh, “Ladybug Tools Aim to Take Environmental Analysis to a Wider Audience,” ). Click here for the Food4Rhino page here. (GH Mac / GH Win)

ArchiDynamics — This plugin creates an interface between Grasshopper and ArchiDynamics Standalone software for real-time wind analysis on buildings, structures and urban developments. It requires GH 6 and it also requires the LunchBox plugin installed first. Importantly about the Standalone version. A Mac version of it will be available soon, says the developer.  Food4Rhino page here. (GH Win)

An image of the ArchiDynamics Grasshopper plugin integration shown, providing integration with the standalone ArchiDynamics CFD software for wind tunnel analysis in built environments.

Eddy — A plugin for wind and outdoor comfort analysis and sustainable architecture design. Unlike other CFD tools, Eddy is easy to learn and use and provides architects with actionable ventilation and comfort metrics such as pressure coefficients and the UTCI distribution. The developers are associated with Cornell University’s Environmental Systems Lab (ES Lab).  Food4Rhino page here. (GH Win)

SWIFT — This plugin for doing advanced CFD modeling with OpenFOAM through Grasshopper. If offers Virtual Wind Tunnel and you can map outdoor wind comfort maps, obtain facade pressure coefficients for multiple wind angles and much more. Beta status but a cool plugin. Food4Rhino page here. (GH Win)

Architecture and BIM

SkinDesigner (SGaray) — This is a really cool plugin for the rapid generation of facade geometries from building massing surfaces. We learned about this plugin from Architosh’s feature on AIA Firm of the Year, Boston’s Payette, in our feature on that firm here. (see, Architosh, “Bespoke Computational Tools at Payette Drive Unforeseen Values to Firm and Client Alike,” 5 Feb 2018.)  Santiago Garay doesn’t have a specific website for this plugin but support is managed via email and the Food4Rhino page here. Interestingly, even though it was not tested on Mac, a user got it running. (GH Mac / GH Win)

Garay’s own SkinDesigner is shown in this image in use with Human UI, also another GH plugin.

Karamba 3D — is an interactive, parametric structural engineering tool using the finite element method that allows the user to analyze and respond to three-dimensional beam and shell structures under loads. It works with the Galapagos solver. It is associated and developed in cooperation with Bollinger und Grohmann ZT, GmbH, Vienna, Austria, and folks are doing remarkable work with it that you can see at the official Karamba 3D website here. Food4Rhino page. (GH Win)

Salamander 3 — this plugin is for structural analysis and enables the user to draw beams, slabs, etc in Rhino alongside the architectural geometry. You can specify loads inside Rhino + GH. You can export to Autodesk Robot and Oasys GSA or even ETABS models. The tool is associated with Ramboll. A cool thing discovered at the Ramboll Computational Design blog site is they have a “complete” Beginner’s Guide to Visual Scripting with Grasshopper. This was written in 2017 and includes extensive text and visuals plus a video. (tutorial is Rhino 6). Food4Rhino page. (GH Win)

TT Toolbox — this GH plugin is developed by Thorton Tomasetti’s CORE studio, the globally well-known engineering firm’s computational research group. CORE develops lots of custom software for the firm and their projects but within this range of activities, they have developed several Grasshopper tools like this one. Food4Rhino page. (GH Win)

Platypus — this GH plugin also developed by Thorton Tomasetti’s CORE studio, was created to allow Grasshopper users to stream geometry to the web in real-time. It works like a chat room for parametric geometry and allows for on-the-fly 3D model mashups in web browsers. Food4Rhino page. (GH Win)

BIM GEOMGYM IFC — this plugin by GeometryGym is an Open BIM add-on for Rhino and Grasshopper enabling IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) model generation and exchange for Open BIM tools like ARCHICAD, Revit, Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer, Tekla and other BIM software with IFC functionalities. This useful plugin’s latest update was for ggRhinoIFC for Mac back in December 2019 and the tool works on both Mac and Windows versions of Rhino 5 as well as version 6 with some limitations, it appears. Food4Rhino page here. (GH Mac / GH Win).

BullAnt — a plugin by GeometryGym like the one above, this GH plugin features computational design tools to enhance and extend the parent program. BullAnt features commands including mesh relaxation (minimal surfaces), mesh inflation (ETFE cushions), symmetry automation, tessellation (polygon packing), structural modeling/sketching (including parametric generation in Grasshopper), geodesic domes and curve network processing. Food4Rhino page. (GH Mac / GH Win).

BullAnt is a GH plugin that enables structural analysis and investigation capabilities to the GH environment. It features a library of common structural shapes.

Topologic — this GH plugin is a modeling library that enables hierarchical and topological representations of architectural spaces, buildings, and artifacts through non-manifold topology (NMT). This type of modeling representation was originally created by Dr. Robert Aish and presented in 2013 at AAG. Dr. Wassim Jabi teamed with Dr. Aish in 2016 to create and advanced this technology into a platform ideal for integration with tools like Dynamo and Grasshopper. Topologic is well suited for creating lightweight representations of building with subdivision, zero-thickness and internal surfaces where the user can query cellular spaces. Food4Rhino page. (GH Win)

PCPA_GH — this plugin is a collection of modeling tools to expand the functionality of Rhino + Grasshopper by the REACH group at Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. This GH plugin is specifically crafted for “design-oriented” practices it is in constant beta form and available with no warranty of performance. While the famed architecture firm’s plugin is available for use, the license expires every two weeks and one must renew it through a form. A website link on the GH plugin goes here. Food4Rhino page here. (GH Win) 

ParaBrick —  a useful GH definition rather than a plugin for designing parametric brick walls. Food4Rhino page here. (GH Mac / GH Win)

next page: Landscape and Urban Design, Robotics and Fabrication and more…

The post INSIDER: A Brief Tour of Select Grasshopper Add-Ons appeared first on Architosh.

Large and marque firms are using AAD (algorithms-aided design) or, often called, “computational design,” but many are also missing out on understanding how to formulate ways to script tools that aid production and address quality control concerns like JPW have tackled.

Such efforts recently won the firm a nod as a finalist in the global 2019 Bentley Infrastructure Awards in the Buildings and Campuses category, for their excellent work with computational design at 6 & 8 Parramatta Square.

JPW has been involved with the Parramatta urban renewal efforts since the masterplan days and has won successive competitions for multiple buildings. The first projects, known as 3 Parramatta Square and 4 Parramatta Square, were large but smaller than 6 & 8 Parramatta Square—with the latter being the primary exemplar of the use of AAD using Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC).

This particular project, 6 & 8 Parramatta Square, will actually be the largest building in Australia, once complete, with a total of 130,000 square meters of area. At 55 stories in height, 8 Parramatta Square, with its unique silhouette, will mark the district in the broader Sydney skyline and form the centerpiece at the heart of the urban renewal project. It sits adjacent to and integrates with Parramatta Station.

A street-level rendered view of 6 & 8 Parramatta Square, designed by award-winning Australian architecture firm Johnson Pilton Walker (JPW). The project was a finalist in the 2019 Bentley YII Awards in the Buildings and Campuses category. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

What is remarkable about JPW’s work through the Parramatta Square projects is the firm’s evolution in the development of new processes and workflow efficiencies by tapping the power of Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC). This has been driven, partly, by faster project schedules. Design and documentation of 6 & 8 Parramatta Square are scheduled for three and a half years, while 4 Parramatta Square will take five.

“Our teams are actually smaller than they used to be,” says Wayne Dickerson, principal at JPW. “The team started quite small, about six people,” says Wayne. “In the past, there would have been a team of about twenty.” With smaller teams and a faster pace for what are much larger buildings for 6 & 8 Parramatta Square, JPW had to look at adopting new design approaches to gain efficiencies.

JPW has been involved in the Parramatta Square development area since master planning. 8 Parramatta Square is the tallest structure and demands a significant silhouette in the skyline. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

They began evaluating where computational design methods presented advantages. Bespoke areas of the project, like the basement, podium, and core were conventionally BIM-modeled in Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer, while areas that were generated by consistent geometric principles, such as the tower structure, tower facade, and ceilings, were scripted with GenerativeComponents technology in OpenBuildings Designer.

“Architects often design to their own intuitive logic,” says Sarah Yap, JPW’s computational design expert on the project. “Computational design is about making that logic explicit, teaching the computer to think in ways we do.”

Computational Design and the Structural Model

When JPW integrated AAD (algorithms-aided design) technologies into the project, much of the conceptional design work had already been resolved. “Typically, computational design would be integrated into the project at the concept stage,” says Sarah. “There were still huge efficiencies to be gained by introducing computational design later in the design process.”

The parts of the building modeled via conventional BIM modeling.

The parts of the building modeled via computational design.

Contractually, JPW was responsible for providing an architectural, structural model that is used for the coordination of services and to verify the model from the structural engineer. The structural engineers sent over tabular data on columns, beams, and slab thicknesses; engineers like to see numbers to verify their calculations, but architects want to see orthogonal drawings to help them understand the spatial implications of the design.

JPW utilized Excel tables to coordinate structural engineer consultant data and to load, check, and generate computational design models for structure. In other words, the Bentley computational design model could be driven by an Excel spreadsheet and thus enabled both coordination and model generation to be handled from this spreadsheet. Color-coding in Excel cells aided checking and coordination work. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

To better resolve these differences between the engineers’ and the architects’ workflows, JPW used Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC) capability with Excel to customize an accelerated and semi-automated workflow for both generative and coordinative purposes. “In order to coordinate our structure, we wanted to compare a table against another table, like with like data,” says Sarah. So the JPW team created their own Excel tables where each cell contains data relating to either the diameter or the height of the column. Excel’s conditional cell formatting changes the colors in the columns in the table, so it is visually apparent where the columns change size as they rise through the tower. A similar table was created for the depths of beams and directly tied to the columns; when one value changes—like the depth of a beam—so too will the height of the column.

Generation of structural columns from Excel data via OBD-GC. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

All of this Excel data then gets utilized in OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC) and is pulled from the tables, such as column height and diameter data, to generate the columns in OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents. A similar process generated the beams. The slabs, however, were handled exclusively through scripts in OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC) and collectively, scripts automatically color-code 3D elements in the model based on parameters.

Conditional formatting in Excel carries over to (OBD-GC) scripts enabling color to aid the process of visually checking the model. Beams are generated here via (OBD-GC) scripts from Excel data. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

With the architect’s structural model—the responsible instrument of service for coordination and final determinate layout in the field—JPW developed more precise methods of coordination, then simply manually selecting elements in a BIM model to confirm data.

“In a BIM program, you can select an object, and you get all this information on the panel on the side,” says Sarah, “but a lot of times, all that information really isn’t necessary. All I really care about at that moment is: what is the thickness of that slab?” Wayne said the color-coding gives you an immediate capacity to visually check the model.

While slabs were not generated via Excel data, the same conditional color-coding was scripted in OpenBuildings Generative Components (OBD-GC) for floor-slab generation. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

With the concrete structural model now generated, JPW next created a recursive script in OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents that would export each of the floors, level by level, traveling up the tower, after each floor has services penetrations subtracted from it. This process required the solid modeling slab penetrations, which were used in Boolean operations as part of the subtraction from the slabs.

A recursive script punches out the holes for services chases, which are modeled as solids in (OBD-GC) and then exports finished floor slabs to Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

In my discussions with Wayne and Sarah, I asked why it wouldn’t be just easier to obtain an IFC model from the structural engineer. Their answer was three-fold. Contractually, they can’t simply reuse the engineer’s structural BIM model even if they had created one. The other was the quality issues with IFC. “Getting the structural data through an Excel file would actually be a lot cleaner for us for use with GenerativeComponents,” says Wayne, “a lot of times we get very good IFC models but other times we don’t.”

“The third and most important reason is that as architects it’s important that we understand the spatial implications of the structure,” adds Sarah, “and often modeling is the best way of familiarizing ourselves with the spatiality of three-dimensional objects but also the numerical data associated with them.”

Computational Design and the Facade System

8 Parramatta Square’s facade design needed to be striking. As the signature commercial tower in the master-planned development, the design team required iterative flexibility to achieve their goals of creating a sophisticated facade using multiple variations within a curtain wall system of metal and glass.

Facades are ideal for computational design, yet JPW’s team also used Excel creatively to both serve as data input and design device. Above, we see a polygonal grid generated by OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC) with each polygon corresponding to a “cell” in an Excel spreadsheet. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

JPW’s approach was to utilize a script that established a polygonal grid, the envelope encompassing the building, where each polygon represented a panel in the facade system. They then created an Excel spreadsheet that tied back to the GC scripts controlling the polygonal grid. The Excel table was, in essence, says Sarah, “an unrolled diagrammatic elevation.”

Each of the panels was parametric on multiple levels. “We could easily modify the dimensions of the various elements of the panels,” says Sarah. “This was critical because of the depths of the panels; their radii were constantly changing due to the demands of the client and the council.”

It turns out the panels were a typology of parts, varying dimensions of elements and omissions or additions of elements. These panel types were not modeled traditionally but generated via scripting.  “It was actually how I learned the GC software,” says Sarah, who studied McNeel’s Grasshopper at university. “It took me a week to do the first one. Then I could just take the script and modify it for the second one, which took me a day. And the next one took me an hour.” That is a very accelerated learning curve and speaks to the power of iteration and automation through algorithms.

A view of the GC facade model with each polygon with matching color-coding from the Excel table. The unique colors correspond to a unique value in the table, which in turn places a complete facade panel into that polygon. See other images. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Like the concrete structural model, again, we see the creative use of Excel in conjunction with OpenBuildings Design GenerativeComponents.

An image of the Excel table as a type of “unrolled facade” that allows designers—especially those with no computational design skills—to interact with the design. By inputting various numbers, colors change in the cell, confirming a particular architectural panel expression. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Wayne expressed an interest in how the Excel data could be approached in collaboration with other principals in the firm. “The query was, how can we take that envelope Excel drawing and actually markup the facade? How can we markup that data and then quickly take it back into Excel?” His comments point to the fact that older architects are very unlikely ever to use visual scripting tools, but many use Excel, and they also sketch by hand—it touches on the issue of how to translate a traditional analog method of design into the digital realm.

A script in OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents generated unique facade panel types. They are then wired into the master facade script to essentially auto-generate facade modeling one panel (polygonal cell) at a time across the facade. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The intriguing “feature” possibility here is a kind of Excel-like table in OpenBuildings Designer or another tool that can be both printed and interacted with at the “data level” quite simply—pushing its cell data back into scripts powering the model and serving up the iterative needs of the design.

A view of the OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents scripts for panelization optionality. A unique script generates a unique panel and is wired by number to the master script, which in turn obtains its number by the Excel table. Thus to model different overall facade expressions one changes numbers in the Excel table. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

While AAD (algorithms-aided design) is most often applied to facade design the parametric typology of panels in combination with the use of Excel data tied into scripts gave JPW two layers of design interaction. A simple number change on the Excel table inserted a different panel type, while scripts parametrically controlled panel type attributes, like extrusion depths, fins, and other attributes. With both the client and the council suggesting changes, this rapid way of responding saved countless hours compared to typical BIM modeling alterations.

GC and Ceilings

With JPW contractually obligated to deliver a BIM model to LOD300, it meant they were required to model many details and fittings architecturally. Recognizing that ceilings are generally driven by other parts of the building, it seemed possible to use OBD-GC to create a script that could automate this 3D model process, similarly to how the structural slabs were generated.

“Typically modeling a ceiling to this level of detail would be near impossible,” says Sarah, “and it is something that our practice has never attempted. GenerativeComponents has made it realistic for us to fulfill this contractual requirement from the general contractor.”

Bentley OBD-GC scripts have similarly been applied to modeling the ceilings. Data for the scripts were derived from ceiling boundary, columns, and core massing. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Their script starts with the outline of the building, offset from the facade, and then references in columns and core massing. All this gets subtracted from the “ceiling region” as defined in the script. Then the region is sliced into thousands of tiles based on a variable setup point and the tile dimension selected by the contractor.

The OBD-GC scripts utilized Excel in that data from overlapping coordinate systems between the ceiling grid and lighting layout cross-checked and performed functions in Excel prior to subtractions of panels in the ceiling grid model. (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The ceiling lighting layout is then referenced in using a system of color-coded rectangles to relate to different lighting types and sizes. The center points of the color-coded rectangles are then exported to Excel, with cells containing the X, Y, and Z coordinates of light fixture center points. Those numbers are then cross-referenced against the tile center points, and if these coordinates match within a certain tolerance a tile is replaced with a light cell.

A similar process was used for the layout of the HVAC ceiling diffusers, by referencing in an IFC model of the engineer’s ductwork and using a bounding box to derive a center point and then coordinating matches to have scripts cut out a precise hole for the diffuser.

Future Lessons—AAD Limitations

In review, JPW took on three major areas of the design, documentation, and coordination of 8 Parramatta Square and found novel ways to combine AAD into the firm’s evolving studio processes. In both the first and third cases, where coordination was crucial, JPW told us that it was the general contractor’s contractual obligation to perform clash detection. However, to streamline coordination between the trades JPW also performs its own in-house clash detection.

However, the firm notes that beyond clash detection there are so many other ways a model can be wrong. Using Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC) technologies the firm has addressed this challenge in scripts. The first way was in using color-coding to establish visual differentiation. Bold colors were used to create immediate recognition and establish visual patterns that would likely correspond to other patterns in the structure. This was done at both the OBD-GC script level and the Excel level.

Secondly, Sarah says they are scripting failure mechanisms into the data flow, so that if input data doesn’t match output data then in some cases the script will fail. This process reflects the software world and the process of “debugging” code. In essence, building in failure mechanisms via AAD, in this scripted manner, suggests the notion of “debugging architecture” in lieu of manual methods of checking for errors where human error through omissions is prone.

AAD methodology in architecture at present has moved far from the initial forays into “generative” form-making and advanced mathematical modeling. JPW architects seem highly interested in using Bentley’s computational design technologies to spend less time on production activities and more time on design activities.

“As architects, we often spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to represent our solutions rather than actually designing them,” says Sarah. “Computational design has allowed our team to focus on resolving problems and finding better design solutions.”

The tower at Martin Place was designed using computational design using Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC). (image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

However, to get there fully they will need to get past limitations in how BIM programs work, how AAD programs work, and how they talk to each other.

“So the new technologies with OpenBuildings, like the parametric data in cells, aren’t fully integrated into GC yet,” says Wayne. “So we are looking at that and obviously that is in the next updates and we will be able to leverage some of that data in GC.” The role of tabular data directly inside AAD tools, their add-ons, or inside BIM is also at play and needs to advance.

JPW’s Practice—Projects and Technology

While 8 Parramatta Square, in particular, has advanced workflows at JPW, that project isn’t the first one to use Bentley’s computational design technologies. The firm has put the GenerativeComponents technologies to work on several other projects prior but not to the same extent as 8 Parramatta Square.

One such project is Metro Martin Place. The tower behind 50 Martin Place at the conceptual facade level was generated entirely in OBD-GC (see image above). The dynamic tower form features complex curves in both the X and Y axes with pronounced horizontal fins or floor-line expressions. An even more dynamic structure is the Singapore Founders Memorial, which was almost completely generated via computational design with OpenBuildings Designer for the internal fit-out and drawings production.

While the firm’s computational design work began with more “generative” use cases, 8 Parramatta Square establishes a beachhead for the practice in the use of scripting to produce automation-based workflow efficiencies.

In the firm’s finalists presentation in Singapore for the Bentley awards program, where this author was a jury member, what stuck out was one of the presentation’s final slides. Sarah stated that a task like updating a facade model on a project like Parramatta Square in the past would take two staff members one week; with scripting and OBD-GC it takes one person one day. And a task like checking and updating tower columns in the past would take one person one week; with scripting and OBD-GC it takes one person one hour.

This makes more sense once you realize that 8 Parramatta Square is a vast project—as noted Australia’s largest to date—and contains over 8,000 facade panels, 1,400 tower columns, and 179,000 ceiling tiles. With ever-faster design and construction schedules, using AAD tools like Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents (OBD-GC) helps firms keep up with the needs of clients and contractors alike.

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.) 

Title image credit: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.

The post INSIDER: How JPW is using Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer GenerativeComponents to Push the Edge of Practice with Technology appeared first on Architosh.

On Wednesday, 9 October 2019, we will release the complete INSIDER Xpresso newsletter #08 to all subscribers. The newsletter from Architosh is free. Our Early Access editions of the popular Emerging Technologies section are for INSIDER members-only and include deeper commentary and more visuals than the newsletter itself. Our deeper analysis commentary will always be written in Architosh blue text.

Importantly, we usually deliver this “Early Access” feature—well, early! Unfortunately, this month I had a family medical emergency and it delayed this release by a week. To make up for that, our deeper analysis commentary is more extensive than in any past edition, and this is a trend I hope to continue going forward.

If you enjoy Architosh or our Xpresso newsletter, share your enthusiasm on Twitter or LinkedIn by clicking the social media buttons on this page. (thank you!).

Xpresso #08—What’s In This Issue

This issue is slightly more compact than previous versions. We discuss just three topics. The first is we go over who Xpresso readers are. We cover what percentage are Decision Makers and which are not. We also cover the spread of interest over various industries. Lastly, we cover what (emTech) topics they are most interested in.

In the middle section, we delve into a Harvard GSD student’s recent thesis on AI in Architecture. The entire thesis was only wrapped up this past May and is available online (link below). Two essays on Medium detail its main aspects and we dive into that.

Finally, we talk about Bricsys and its recent Boston Road Show visit. In particular, we are fascinated with its discussion of AI initiatives as discussed in Boston and we cover them in detail. As usual, for INSIDER Members reading this here on Architosh, I provide deeper analysis, commentary, and coverage than what is published in the newsletter, a unique benefit of being a subscriber.

TOC emTech #08

• Xpresso Reader Demographics and Reader Interest Areas (with commentary)
• Artificial Intelligence in Architecture: Harvard Thesis Published (with commentary)
• BricsysCAD BIM Event in Boston—AI Discuss (with commentary)

Who’s Reading Xpresso

Last month we said we would share some demographics about who is reading INSIDER Xpresso. Those signed up for this newsletter are overwhelmingly in the Architecture industry. Here’s the breakdown by industry (see graph).

As you can see, just about 6 out of every 10 readers are in the Architecture industry. Surprisingly, we have 1 out of 10 in the Software industry, tied with 1 out of 10 are the Engineering domains. So who is reading from the Software industry?

It turns out over 80 percent of those in the software industry are executives and 85 percent of readers in the software industry are working for AEC domain software companies, while the remaining 15 percent are investment analysts.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only). 50 percent of all readers in the software category are either CEO, CTO, President or a VP. Of the following leading AEC software companies in no particular order—Autodesk, AMD, Bentley, Bricsys, Bluebeam, Graphisoft, Nemetschek, Solibri, Vectorworks and several leading VR software companies—80 percent of those listed above have senior-level or executive staff reading Architosh INSIDER Xpresso.

Clearly, Xpresso has caught the eye of top executives in the leading AEC software companies and we are thrilled that Xpresso, in just less than one year has garnered so much attention from the AEC software industry. In addition to this, the Software industry readers also consist of investment (VC) professionals and analysts on Wall Street—totaling 15 percent of this 10 percent segment of readers. It may not surprise folks to hear that over the past two decades, Architosh receives regular emails from Wall Street investment analysts, asking for market analysis information, typically for the AEC industry. 

What Xpresso Readers Are Interested In

We also have some information on what Xpresso readers are interested in. While we ask just a few questions upon signing up for the newsletter, we asked for a multi-choice selection of interests (listed below):

• AI / ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning)
• AEC CAD/BIM
• Architectural Visualization (ArchViz)
• CAE, FEA and Simulation Technologies
• Computation and Algorithmic-Aided Design (AAD)
• CDE (common data environments) and Cloud-based Project Management Tools
• Robotics and Automation (including 3D printing)
• Drones and Laser Tech
• AR and VR Tech
• Process and Plant CAD/BIM
• MCAD and PLM

Given our dominant Architecture industry audience, with the next strongest segment being Engineering (10% of readers), it shouldn’t surprise folks that the least popular topics of those above are:

• MCAD and PLM
• Process and Plant CAD/BIM
• CAE, FEA and Simulation Tech

However, we were very surprised to learn that the number one topic of reader interests for our Xpresso readers wasn’t what we consider an Emergent Technology (emTech). Most of the selections above are emTech-related—or what we consider “edge-of-market” versus “center-market” technologies. For our INSIDER Members, we provide a very rare short break-down of the top three most interested in technologies from the list above.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only).  It turns out that INSIDER Xpresso readers are most interested in AEC CAD/BIM, with 70 percent of readers selecting that choice for interest. No other interest, emTech or otherwise, had more than 61 percent interest. But our top five most interested-in categories by Xpresso readers are (in scrambled order):

• VR / AR
• AEC CAD/BIM
• AI / ML
• ArchViz
• Computational Design / AAD

At least three of these technologies are Xpresso emTech darlings. We have written about Artificial Intelligence (AI / ML) in AEC a lot. This issue also focuses on that. We have also had very high-level VR, AR, and MR coverage in Xpresso in the Special Features section. In issue #08 we focus on 3D printing and additive manufacturing. 

Robots Aren’t So Hot

It is important to note that we have spent considerable time addressing robotics and automation in AEC— which focuses on Architecture and Construction, more than Engineering. While I am particularly interested in robotics in AEC, only 4 out of 10 readers appear to be interested in this category. Bear in mind that 25 percent of all Xpresso readers are in either Engineering, Construction or the AEC-domain Software industry. While the AEC software industry is on the edge and looking into Robotics, and while the popular press talks incessantly about labor shortages in construction and Robotics as a kind of savior for the industry, it turns out that among Xpresso readers this just isn’t that popular.

Xpresso readers are interested in a wide range of topics with VR/AR and AI/ML leading the (emTech) segment items. AAD is third while emergent technologies like Robotics lag behind these but not by much.

When we talk about “edge-of-market” (EoM)—a term Pete Evans and I first started using for our Perspectives on AIA BEST of SHOW awards here on Architosh—we mean both actual adoption and use of technologies but just as importantly, awareness within the industries of the availability of these technologies. Very EoM tech may have less than 1 percent adoption. Computational design, for example, may have less than 2 percent actual market adoption in AEC firms, despite the fact that architecture students have much higher use of AAD (algorithmic-aided design). 

It is important to note that of the five leading topics listed above, there is only a 20 percent spread between them. And now that we are aware of these favorites, our Xpresso coverage will better reflect the actual favorites of readers. 

AI in Architecture—Harvard Thesis on Medium

In May of 2019, Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) student, Stanislas Chaillou, submitted his graduate thesis on Artificial Intelligence and Architecture. He has published two long essays based on this thesis on Medium, which we will talk about in a minute. The entire thesis itself is available here, titled, “AI + Architecture: Towards a New Approach,” available at ACADEMIA.edu.

Stanislas Chaillou begins his thesis by stating that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “creating the conditions of a reflexive empowerment: the machine could become a trustworthy ‘assistant’ provided professionals educate it, or properly ‘explain’ the job.”

Chaillou’s thesis closes by stating that AI in Architecture isn’t in doubt as to its existence or imposition to the field but rather that it faces the challenge of knowing its key role as an “intelligent assistant.”

Just as importantly if not more so, Chaillou’s thesis pays particular attention to noting that AI isn’t a sudden technological disruption—though some may argue this a different way in the form of a Clayton Christiansen innovator’s dilemma way—but rather it “is the culminating point of 70 years of inventions and innovations” in and around the world of Architecture and Computing.

Inventions and Innovations, chart of progress towards AI in Architecture, by Stanislas Chaillou. (image: Stanislas Chaillou)

Chaillou’s these rests on research over 70 years of invention and innovation and on his timelines spans into four major periods of progress (1) Modularity, (2) Computational Design, (3) Parametricism, and (4) Artificial Intelligence. He says of these, they “are to us the four intricated steps of a slow-paced transition.”

Interestingly, Chaillou distinguishes between “inventions” and “innovations” as the former being associated with academic research, while innovations are induced by inventions. This idea may apply far more deeply to 20th-century digital innovation than to pre-digital industrialized progress. Carlota Perez roots each of her techno-economic paradigm (TEP) shifts (or Great Surges) from emanating from a singular invention. “In architecture, Innovations actually shape a continuously moving practice,” writes Chaillou.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only).

At Architosh we have written a lot about Carlotta Perez, the British-Venezuelan scholar-historian specializing in technological-economic history as seen through her theory of great surges, a development based on Schumpeter’s work on Kondratieff waves. Chaillou’s terms “slow-paced transition” conjure up the visualization of the speed of ripples on the water after a pebble has been dropped into a still pond. This stillness or a false sense of stasis is just a period of time when a new “common sense” pervades society about how to go about doing things. Chaillou doesn’t take his four periods of evolution in Architecture towards AI and ground them in larger Kondratieff waves of technological progress, but he does emphasis emphasize evolution rather than dramatizing disruption. 

His Four Periods—Towards AI in Architecture

Chaillou has Inventions and Theories on its own timeline compared to Innovations. You can see his interesting chart graphic here (or the screen capture above). He shows the world of architecture and computer science moving from Modularity to Computational Design to Parametricism and finally to AI. To read his full two-part essay go here.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only)

Chaillou’s timeline and its connections are quite interesting as origins for AI in Architecture. It seems reasonable to begin with Gropius’ “Baukastan” concept, a german word that translates to “construction kit.” The concept of modularity results in key terms like “grid” and “component” and leads to the world of buildings becoming further standardized. 

Walking through the history of CAD is to be expected in an essay like this but Chaillou lays emphasis on Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form written by the architecture and UC Berkley professor, a book that I was unaware had such a large impact on the software community. From Alexander to Negroponte at MIT to Gehry and Jim Glymph at Gehry Technologies, Chaillou tracks the history of computational design as CAD (computer-aided design). But eventually, it is Gehry’s work that requires control over more complex shapes that help lead our way to parametricism. 

Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad with the embedded notion of an “atomic constraint” combines with Professor Luigi Moretti’s first ideas of parameterization. These ideas formulate together for Samuel Giesberg, founder of Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), and lead to Pro/ENGINEER. From here it is Schumacher and Zaha Hadid that lead to David Rutten’s development of Grasshopper and the evolution of algorithmic-aided design (AAD). 

Chaillou’s thesis begins to break down when he talks about BIM’s origins, however. Noting correctly that BIM too is driven by parameterization, he states it “started in the early 2000’s” when in fact BIM, as a shipping product, began with the Virtual Building concept by GRAPHISOFT. 

BricsysCAD BIM Event in Boston—AI Discuss

Back in late mid-September, the Bricsys folks were in Boston for an “international Road Show” of BricsCAD and AI. I attended this event with great enthusiasm and wondered how many people would show up. It was held at the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) building in downtown Boston and in the same room as most user-group meetings for various BIM platforms.

The Bricsys folks fancy themselves Revit killers. Could they be right? Their Boston event last month was quite well-attended for a company supposedly nobody knows about. Shocking, right?

My first comment about this even was the utter surprise of finding so many folks in attendance. Big names in the world of AutoCAD were there, including former Autodesk employee Heidi Hewett, now Product Owner, Bricsys/Hexagon PPM. Robert Green, also well-known in the world of AutoCAD and newly minted Director of Implementation, Bricsys/Hexagon PPM.

A considerable part of this event focused on the AI side of things for BricsCAD BIM. This is what we want to focus on in this (emTech) section.

Intelligent Collaboration Between Designer and Machine

Bricsys has a fairly large team devoted to artificial intelligence (AI). In one slide at the event, I got to see pictures of the folks involved in the AI team. It wasn’t one or two AI specialists. It was bigger than that. (see Commentary below).

The Machine

Don Stribu, VP Communications, Bricsys/Hexagon PPM, delivered the interesting AI section of the presentation. Because it was here that they laid out the rough framework for how AI interfaces the human designer. Stribu started by asking the question, what is the AI good for versus what is the human good for? Here’s where AI can help:

• Repetitive Tasks — common CAD/BIM today is filled with repetitive tasks, from completing dialog boxes, repeating common elements, etc. Bricsys is looking at all forms of repetitive tasks and looking at how AI can do these tasks partly or completely for the human designer. This speeds up work, saves time and money and even errors.
• Design Documentation — Bricsys knows that you can train AI’s to learn and understand; they can be trained to recognize patterns. For example, given a particular building design, where should cross-sections of the building be drawn? They are working on training AI to understand this and to just implement them automatically without human intervention. If the human disagrees, they can easily override the choice and move sections to other parts of the building.
• Local Solutions Based on Experience — this is where AI gets really interesting. By seeing how various details are dealt with in other areas of the building, the AI can complete the details in similar areas.
• Style suggestions as inspiration — a more questionable area for AI integration, an AI can find sources of inspiration based on example inputs.
• Complexity Management — this is a very good area where AI can aid human designers by helping to oversee complexity in a project and alert human architects to areas of concern.
• Verification of Design Goals — AIs can run tests to verify that building designs are meeting stated goals and building codes compliance.

Before we move on to what the Human does best versus the AI, let me share some of my thoughts based on 30 plus years of practice in architecture.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only).

BricysCAD BIM’s best AI-inspired technology thus far, in my view, is the BIMify technology that enables human designers to freely model and let the system self-assign elements to correct classification—that is, this is a roof, a floor, a column, a window, etc. This removes an awkward step in design: pre-selecting element types in order to model or create architecture. 

Heidi Hewett is a well-known name in the AutoCAD world. But she has moved to Bricsys because she believes in their technologies.

What architects like myself really want to see with AI is a way to dramatically accelerate our processes—particularly construction documents but also getting from design models to construction documents. Bricsys needs to also think about AAD (algorithmic-aided design) tools and how designers can parameterize complex overall forms that drive (child) dependent forms and elements. But we understand that the Hexagon company has plans to achieve this with the help of the Rhino+Grasshopper folks. 

The Human

Where do Bricsys think the human has their strengths? From the slide above this is where:

• Identifying design goals — human architects will feed the system with the necessary data so that AIs can understand what the goals are.
• Prototyping — just as AI’s will be trained to automatically generate coordinated drawing documentation, they will also generate prototype designs for humans to evaluate.
• Style and Detail Choices — naturally human architects will rule in the area of architectural expression—style, history, contextualization, material and color selections, etc.
• Aesthetics — same as above, humans will handle all aesthetics considerations in terms of final decisions.
• Constructive Feedback — humans will train AIs via feedback loops that strengthen AIs to better help them with the AI tasks listed above
• Innovation — only humans can do true innovation.

The Bricsys folks admit that many of these bullet points are still goals for them and they have no serious solutions with AI in all of these areas, but they are working very hard on them. Part of their overall argument is that they feel they have a very strong AI team that can bring industry-first innovations to the use of artificial intelligence to BIM in the AEC market.

Further Commentary (INSIDER Members-only)

So Bricsys has an AI R&D team size of approximately 10 people. This isn’t paltry but it also isn’t massive. Given their overall team size the size of this team looks appropriately aggressive in terms of pushing for advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) in BIM. 

Final Comments

The (emTech) section of Issue #08 of our monthly newsletter (INSIDER Xpresso) is a bit different this month. We just focused a bit more on a few items rather than cover lots and lots of other topics across a range of our emergent technologies focuses. Please let us know how you like this format or if you prefer us covering more topics but at a thinner coverage level. You can write to us at Xpresso@architosh.com

Please be sure to read the Special Feature in the email newsletter. And if you are an INSIDER Member subscriber reading this, please consider subscribing to our free Xpresso newsletter.

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