Developed by APREA, The Avenue aims to bring urban sophistication into conversation with the calm of the Gulf Coast—a kind of “urban ease, coastal spirit” fusion that Naples has never quite seen before. It’s a walkable enclave framed by galleries, restaurants, with palm-lined “alleys” and a retail base that opens generously to Naples’ public streets. Yet beyond its architectural ambition lies an equally compelling story about how visualization shaped the project’s trajectory—transforming a simple animation request into a powerful design and marketing narrative.

A Vision Evolving in Real Time

When APREA first approached Panoptikon, the European visualization studio led by Tudor Vasiliu, the initial brief was for a single film—just enough to convey the project’s mood and architectural language. But as early imagery came to life, the process began to expand.

The Avenue in Naples, Florida, is an upscale new development. World-renowned visualization studio Panoptikon shares how their work and process impacted the project and led to developer success in a town that doesn’t take new large-scale development easily. (Image: Panoptikon) (Click on image for larger view)

“What started as one animation became a full suite of 68 visuals,” Vasiliu tells me. “We developed exteriors, interiors, and atmospheric studies that helped not only market the project but also refine it. The visuals actually fed back into the design.”

That back-and-forth is not unusual today, yet in The Avenue’s case, the feedback loop became essential. The developer, deeply involved in shaping both the brand and the architecture, began to use Panoptikon’s draft renders to guide adjustments with the design team. Material choices, façade tones, and courtyard detailing were refined directly in response to what the visualization revealed.

“He would see something in a draft image,” Vasiliu explains, “and go back to the architects saying, ‘Let’s change this metal,’ or ‘That light feels wrong.’ It was a live collaboration—what we visualized became part of the design decision chain.”

The Naples Context

To appreciate the project’s impact, it helps to understand Naples itself: an affluent, Florida coastal city more known for Mediterranean motifs and manicured charm than urban experimentation. The developer, an industry veteran branching out on his own, was intent on challenging that pattern.

The Avenue from the sky fits into Naples, Florida, so well that it is hard to spot it at first. In this image, the arched block buildings are on the wide avenue running from lower left to upper right. (Image: Panoptikon) (Click on image for larger view)

“The Avenue offers something unprecedented in Naples,” says Vasiliu. “A fully activated retail ground floor, with interior alleys and courtyards turned into retail experiences. It’s an urban gesture that adds to the typology of the city rather than disrupts it.”

This sensitivity—to both place and narrative—is what distinguishes Panoptikon’s approach. Their film for The Avenue could have been a standard architectural walkthrough. Instead, they proposed something more cinematic—a mood piece that captured Naples in transition: elegant, approachable, quietly confident.

“It wasn’t about showing every apartment or corridor,” Vasiliu recalls. “It was about emotion—the light, the atmosphere, the sense of calm sophistication.”

A Classical Foundation Meets Contemporary Tools

Vasiliu’s sensitivity to story is rooted in his training. “Architecture is in my family’s blood,” he says. “Both my parents are architects, my siblings too. I was raised in studio hallways. I’m a classically trained architect—in the pre-computer sense. Pencils and airbrushes before the pixels came.”

The Avenue features a prominent pedestrian-friendly streetscape where Naples residents will find unique and name-brand retail shops, cafes, and restaurants. (Image: Panoptikon)

That analog background gives Panoptikon’s work a compositional depth that distinguishes it from algorithmic hyperrealism. The studio’s images balance photographic precision with painterly restraint, allowing architecture to feel tactile and human.

Yet their workflow is anything but nostalgic. For The Avenue film, Panoptikon relied on Chaos Vantage, a GPU-based real-time renderer tightly integrated with 3ds Max and V-Ray. “Vantage gave us the speed we needed,” Vasiliu explains. “We could update our Max scenes and instantly see the changes in real time. Compared to V-Ray alone, it saved us enormous render time.”

In an industry increasingly obsessed with turnaround speed, that matters. “Almost everyone is in a rush,” he admits. “Developers want visuals yesterday. Real-time tools like Vantage make it possible to deliver high-quality faster, without breaking the creative flow.”

The Art of Empathy

Still, technology is only one side of the equation. What emerges most clearly in conversation with Vasiliu is his insistence on empathy—the human understanding required to translate between architects, developers, and audiences.

Projecting and selling a lifestyle is a key component of value to visualizations for developers. (Image: Panoptikon)

“When clients outsource visualization abroad, they sometimes think they’re just buying images,” he says. “But what they really need is a partner—someone who understands design, who can sit patiently through iterations, and who knows that the changes architects request often come from their own clients. We see ourselves as part of that process, not outside it.”

That empathy is grounded in Panoptikon’s origins in the European market, where visualization studios often step in to resolve unfinished interiors or underdeveloped design details. “In some countries,” Vasiliu notes, “exteriors are beautifully resolved, but interiors lag behind. We had to step in creatively, helping to define lighting, materials, and even layouts. It trained us to think as designers during our visualization work.”

That blend of design literacy and visualization craft positions Panoptikon uniquely in an era when architects themselves increasingly produce high-fidelity renderings. “Yes, architects can now do what used to require a specialist,” he says, “but what they often don’t have is time. That’s where we add value—speed, consistency, and the storytelling sensibility that comes from architectural training.”

Collaborative Design by Visualization

For The Avenue, that sensibility shaped not just the images but the process itself. Panoptikon worked closely with MHK Architecture and interior designer Nainoa to visualize interiors rooted in spatial continuity—open thresholds, filtered light, and materials that flow between inside and out.

“Materiality, flow, and light merge in a series of spaces designed for both retreat and connection,” the project’s narrative reads, and the visuals reflect that ethos. Soft coastal palettes dissolve into shaded courtyards; terraces blur into living rooms under the Gulf breeze.

An interior view of one of the residential units at The Avenue, Naples, Florida. (Image: Panoptikon)

In this way, visualization became an extension of design authorship—a medium through which architects could see the implications of their own decisions before committing them to construction. “Good architecture sells itself,” says Vasiliu. “When a design already says something powerful, our job is easier. But when a design lacks that clarity, visualization can help uncover it.”

Tools, Workflows, and the Changing Landscape

Panoptikon’s toolset remains firmly rooted in Autodesk 3ds Max, despite its quirks. “It’s both a source of power and frustration,” Vasiliu laughs. “But companies like Chaos understand the psychology of artists—they’re building ecosystems that simplify workflow.”

He cites Chaos Cosmos, an integrated library of 3D assets, as one example. “It saves time and unifies standards. We’re paying for a lot—dozens of software subscriptions across rendering, collaboration, AI, and project management—but these are professional tools. Studios need to recognize that investment as part of their craft.”

That emphasis on quality and professional ethics is part of why The Avenue resonated with its stakeholders. The project not only impressed Naples’ design and development community but also catalyzed new opportunities. “The agency managing the project started recommending us left and right,” Vasiliu says. “It showed that our partnership approach works.”

The Broader Reflection

What The Avenue demonstrates is the shifting nature of architectural visualization itself. Once a passive act of representation, visualization is now a dynamic instrument of design feedback, stakeholder communication, and emotional storytelling. It’s where architecture becomes both understandable and aspirational.

For developers, visualization unlocks the lifestyle they’re selling. For architects, it tests the coherence of form and material. And for visualization studios like Panoptikon, it’s the stage where empathy meets technology—a space where design intelligence and narrative instinct merge.

“The landscape is changing,” Vasiliu reflects. “The old rules no longer apply. We have to be quick on our feet, ready for anything. But it still comes down to partnership—people who understand, who express ideas beautifully. That’s the essence of architecture itself.”

In The Avenue, that essence is tangible. What began as pixels on a screen has become a physical place that Naples hadn’t imagined before—one that embodies its coastal grace while quietly rewriting its urban story. And behind that transformation lies the evolving art of visualization: the craft of seeing before it’s built.

Editor’s Notes

Tudor Vasiliu is an architect turned architectural visualizer and the founder of Panoptikon (https://thepanoptikon.com/), an award-winning high-end architectural visualization studio serving clients globally. With over 18 years of experience, Tudor and his team help the world’s top architects, designers, and property developers realize their vision through high-quality 3D renders, films, animations, and virtual experiences. Tudor has been honored with the CGarchitect 3D Awards 2019 – Best Architectural Image, and has led industry panels and speaking engagements at industry events internationally, including the D2 Vienna Conference, State of Art Academy Days, Venice, Italy, and Inbetweenness, Aveiro, Portugal – among others.

The post When Renders Talk Back: Panoptikon and the New Role of Visualization in Design appeared first on Architosh.

However, much is not known about Austin—outside of Austin. Most do not know that Austin is nicknamed “Silicon Hills” due to its concentration of technology companies. Apple, IBM, Dell, Google, and Facebook all have a major presence there, and those are just some of the big names. Another surprising fact is that Austin, Texas, isn’t exactly like the dry Wild West landscapes we see in Western films.

Austin, Texas, has a unique environment characterized by its humid subtropical climate. This climate presents specific challenges and opportunities for residential architecture in the city.

Enter François Lévy Architect

For local architect François Lévy, the specific design task for most of his clients is balancing a range of site constraints and opportunities that will naturally quarrel with the realities of the Austin environment—especially that Texas sun.

Lévy is an accomplished Austin-based architect, author, and former educator who specializes in developing architecture that is both sustainable and highly responsive to climate and energy use. His practice is 80 percent residential and 20 percent commercial architecture.

“We are cooling dominant here in Austin,” says Lévy, “and it can be tricky,” referring to whether the design of a building’s cooling and heating systems is more challenged on one or the other of those tasks. In Austin, as in most of Texas, the task of a building’s systems to keep its occupants comfortable amounts to cooling the building much more than heating it on an annual basis.

This Austin-based custom residence by François Lévy is a prime example of how to leverage BIM technology in the design process to optimize sustainable design goals and outcomes. (click for larger image) (Image: Boussoleil | François Lévy Architecture + Interiors.)

The reader may be thinking, doesn’t that just mean you run the AC units more than you run the heater? What’s so difficult about that?

That’s the tricky part Lévy was referring to. “We will be in the mid-80s today, and we are in late November,” he adds during our hour-long Zoom interview. “But the sun is on a low winter sun path, and it can be quite challenging.” That low sun path means the roofs are designed to shade the harsh Texas sun during the hotter months of the year while allowing the sun to penetrate and warm the house during the cooler months of the year. These are working as devised, yet due to climate change, the house and its occupants must contend with an increasingly less rare mid-80 degree day, like today, in late November.

This is what makes it challenging but also fun for an architect like Lévy. In an ideal scenario, the way to design a house in Austin that optimizes its response to the effects of the sun during all the changing months of the year is to develop a long, skinny house that runs east to west. The large north side can capture abundant non-glaring indirect light, while the south side, shaded with deep overhangs, protects against sun exposure. In contrast, the narrower east and west sides present a smaller surface area (target) for heat-inducing low sun angles.

However, long bar-shaped residences often don’t fit property boundaries or sloping grades as gracefully as one might desire. That was exactly the issue with one such Lévy project for a couple that desired an energy-efficient home they could gracefully age in place in. It needed to be on one level, capture views, and respond to the Texas sun so as to optimize energy use. The house also needed to fit the best it could on the site to balance cut and fill challenges with the sloping grades. (see image above and below)

Data-Driven Iteration

To accomplish this challenge—a careful balancing act between the cost of site grading adjustments, working with existing site grades, and setting the house’s orientation for optimal energy utilization—Lévy relied on a data-driven process using Vectorworks BIM software.

He first set the house in the optimal solar orientation, exactly east-west. This resulted in the highest site cost for cut and fill operations. It also negatively impacted valuable existing trees. Next, he set the house orientation for optimal relations to existing grades, yielding superior cut and fill operations. But this resulted in inferior solar orientation.

He then tested rotating the house orientation in small steps to arrive at an optimal balance between the best solar orientation and the best scenario with cut and fill against the existing site grades. Importantly, if one reviews the sun path data on a solar elevation graph, the angle of sunlight impinging on a surface (insolation) graphed against orientation or azimuth is a sinusoidal curve (see image lower down in article) with the peak always at due south (180 degrees). However, the curve is flatter at the top, so small percentage adjustments off of due-south orientations result in similar sun path angles.

Lévy ultimately elected 15 degrees off of due south to avoid the existing trees and found a reasonable level in relation to existing grades and cut and fill quantities. Solar orientation wasn’t as optimal as directly due south but reasonably close.

The Austin-based custom residence by François Lévy, as built, had to strategically leverage a BIM-based careful analysis of sun-shading data and fill-cut data to find the optimal site orientation, also recognizing the value of existing trees. (Image: Boussoleil | François Lévy Architecture + Interiors.)

To achieve this data-driven design approach, Lévy capitalized on the capabilities built into his favorite BIM software, Vectorworks Architect. Unlike 2D CAD software only, 3D BIM software inherently creates a virtual building with volumetric 3D data to power the types of calculations that make data-driven design possible.

“We could do calculations manually in CAD, but if you want to do that more than once, it quickly kills iteration,” adds Lévy. “That is the beauty of BIM, and you can almost say that the ‘I’ in BIM is for iteration.” Lévy is a long champion of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and the author of two leading books on BIM for the architecture industry, including BIM for Design Firms.

His suggestion that the letter “I” in BIM is for “iteration” is a clever twist on the meaning and advantages of BIM. As he will state, without the “information” or “I” in BIM, you lack the data to do the types of automated iteration. “The fact that I can run as many what-if scenarios as I want just makes it really more exploratory, and I can ask all the questions I like,” says Lévy. (see animation images below).

Drought and Sun

The environment of Austin, Texas, is no doubt hot at times. Battling the sun is crucial, and one can see from Lévy’s established body of work that many of his projects have large, low-slung roofs with big overhangs.

These large roofs are ideal for capturing rainwater and directing it into rainwater storage, such as cisterns. For Lévy, the roofs are also ideal form-givers in architecture, but they are constantly performative in that they serve multiple roles related to sustainable design goals, from solar energy harvesting potential via photovoltaic solar cells to rainwater capture to delivering precise volumes of shade on specific openings (doors and windows) on south-facing walls.

Regarding the challenges of the sun and shading, I asked Lévy when he calculates and reviews shading in the BIM model in Vectorworks Architect.

Solar studies and animations in Vectorworks Architect software, with the house at different orientations. (Image: Boussoleil | François Lévy Architecture + Interiors.)

“I really look at October 20th,” he added. “That is the time of the year here in Austin when we start shifting from cooling loads to heating loads. But even at that time of year, the sun has a pretty low sun path.” With October 20th being the time to move slowly to heating loads, it makes sense that the roof overhangs are no longer casting shadows on south-facing openings. “In general, I don’t want to be over-shaded,” he says.

Lévy’s sun studies methodology involves more than just October 20th; it also considers the summer and winter solstices. “I don’t bother with the equinox,” he says. To accomplish these sun and shade studies, the 3D BIM model is run through very precise animations that are easy to do in Vectorworks Architect. (see image above). He also utilizes the built-in Heliodon tool in the software.

“The slider tool with sun studies is very handy,” adds Lévy, “but I can do multiple animations of the same design or competing designs at different times of the year, and those are so easy to do and share with clients.”

Vectorworks—Superior Flexibility

Lévy is a passionate fan of his software of choice, Vectorworks. The industry has long lauded Vectorworks for its hybrid nature as a leading BIM authoring application for the AEC industry and a powerful 2D and 3D CAD program that rivals AutoCAD’s legacy of past dominance. While most architectural practitioners now use at least a partial BIM workflow, Lévy has long adapted a full-fledged BIM process from the very earliest stages of design.

This azimuth chart helps explain the important but impactful decision matrix-like process used by François Lévy, powered by the data in a BIM model and leveraging rapid-iteration capabilities that can only be tested with a BIM model.  (Image: Boussoleil | François Lévy Architecture + Interiors.)

“The fact that you have data in BIM from the beginning, you can immediately generate calculations,” he says. He immediately analyzes the surface areas of roofs for rainwater capture and the total glazing areas of the cardinal (N-S-E-W) sides of his buildings. A critical calculation is the ratio of glass to solid wall, as Lévy leverages rules of thumb long documented in professional handbooks for architectural engineering.

Vectorworks captures and organizes this data from BIM objects like roofs and windows and doors into its powerful Worksheet features. These worksheets are like powerful Excel spreadsheets, complete with mathematical functions for calculations. The Vectorworks community has developed many of them for interesting needs, including quality assurance (QA) roles like checks to make sure all walls that are meant to be orthogonal are truly so.

The final house orientation captures the optimal balance between site-specific issues (cut and fill and trees to preserve) and sustainability issues (sun-shadow and energy utilization). (Image: Boussoleil | François Lévy Architecture + Interiors.)

“While I do love the Heliodon tool, if I am going to really nerd out, I would say I love the Worksheets and their functions inside Vectorworks the most,” adds Lévy, who contends that the Worksheets embody the best aspects of the power of flexibility with Vectorworks.

Luc Lefebvre, product marketing manager at Vectorworks, Inc., says that the company has added many worksheet functions in recent years so that users can report on all kinds of data embedded within each object. Unlike any other BIM software, data can be linked to external databases such as Excel and communicate (or sync) bi-directionally with Vectorworks worksheets. While Lévy doesn’t utilize this capability in his workflows, he acknowledges its power to connect data to those used by others, such as consultants and contractors. 

“I would say the aspect of Vectorworks that makes it most compelling to me is its flexibility and the fact that I can have an entire project from its Parti diagram up to a complete CA file that reflects the last-minute design decisions all within the same application,” says Lévy. “That is very powerful to me and something I would never want to give up.”

“For me, design really happens throughout all phases of the project,” he adds. “If I had to use different tools for each phase of a project, then I would find a lot of opportunities for things to fall through the cracks, in addition to the general inefficiency of moving between different design tools.”

Data, AI, and the Future

I asked Lévy if there were any recent projects other than custom residential work that were particularly interesting from the point of view of sustainability. He noted an Austin city historical building project that has long been in the works. 

“The most sustainable building is the one you don’t have to throw away,” remarks Lévy. “Local buildings that pre-date mechanical cooling, while not up to modern energy standards by any means, do benefit from having been designed and built with climate in mind: high ceilings for stratification of warm air, appropriate roof overhangs for shade, and they tend to have ample natural ventilation.”

Perhaps somewhat ironically, for someone who’s built a practice on technology, Lévy himself lives in a 120-year-old former train depot, where he and his wife relocated to Austin. A current project of his involves the restoration of a circa-1899 grocery store turned private residence. Lévy worked on the project well over a decade ago, but an earlier owner abandoned it, and the building’s been boarded up ever since. When a new client appeared to save this historic landmark, Lévy had the good fortune to be called in once again. It’s a testament to Vectorworks’ robustness that his BIM files from the early 2010s opened right up and are the basis for the current design work.

While the firm’s sustainable-oriented residential projects are Lévy’s specialty, he has sometimes served as a sustainability consultant for other architectural firms. The city of Austin has long been focused on climate change and sustainable design. “Austin has a robust program that actually predates LEED,” adds Lévy. “So, in some cases—as in the historical project just noted—that may be the benchmark we are striving for in projects, or it may be LEED or something else.”

As energy—and climate-focused design becomes more critical to the practice of architecture, architects need more data to help them make better decisions. Lévy is thrilled to see that Vectorworks Architect’s future includes developing a Sustainability Dashboard, a web-based palette that will show in graphic form how design decisions are impacting your project compared to a set goal.

Other items under the “active research” category of the Vectorworks Public Roadmap include a daylight analysis feature set, which could be critical in Lévy’s work in Austin, which has large southern overhangs that clearly impact daylighting. 

A view of the beautiful interior of the Austin-based custom home by François Lévy Architecture + Interiors. (Image: François Lévy Architecture + Interiors.)

“Another big trend we see related to sustainability is the growing proportion of adaptive reuse projects for all project types,” says Luc Lefebvre. “This is a huge opportunity to develop a solution to address building renovation workflow. This will significantly improve what you can currently do to document renovation or adaptive reuse projects. Currently in development, this new feature utilizes object data to generate the documentation needed for these types of projects quickly.”

Data and AI are big evolving stories within the Nemetschek Group and its daughter companies like Vectorworks, Inc. “There is huge potential there,” adds Lefebvre. “We are looking at a lot of things both internally and within the Nemetschek Group. 

MORE: Nemetschek Group announces vision for Artificial Intelligence

While the Nemetschek Group and Vectorworks continue to push forward on BIM, data advancements, and AI technologies, Lévy has long learned to extract value from his expert knowledge of a BIM solution, one that he values more and more as he continues to stay solely focused within one application for his entire workflow, as he adds: “Vectorworks’ big tent approach is super appealing to me.”

The post François Lévy On the Power of BIM For Sustainability appeared first on Architosh.

From conceptual designs to large master plans, NG+P believes that great design goes beyond great aesthetics, showcased, for example, by their innovative sustainable residential complexes. The firm has won numerous design honors and even patented an urban-fill design solution known as “New Block,” which offers lower-cost, sustainable concept design for smaller urban lots.

Some notable projects from their award-winning portfolio include The Q Topanga project, a 347-unit mixed-use development that blends luxury urban living with a resort-style atmosphere that creates a sense of relaxation and community for its residents.

The Q Topanga project is shown in this image. A mixed-use luxury urban living project with 347 residential units. (Image: NG+P, All rights reserved.)

Millennium PQ is another residential project located near San Diego, California, that consists of eight separate buildings totaling 331 residential apartments in Type-3 and V-A wood frame structures, with a complimentary amenity-oriented campus with a private pool, cabana, and state-of-the-art clubhouse and fitness center.

And another recent project is SJ Eaight, located near Sunset Junction in what Forbes magazine listed as “American’s Best Hipster Neighborhood.” This Silver Lake, Los-Angeles area based project features three-story, single-family detached homes with modern, clean lines, large modern kitchens, and stunning views of city lights in downtown LA.

NG+P is a progressive BIM-forward firm executing its projects fully in 3D and BIM workflows using Autodesk Revit at the center of its design and documentation workflows and leveraging other leading digital technologies like US-based Bluebeam with its Studio collaborative workflow technology, among numerous other digital tools.

In the interview below, we speak with firm architect and senior designer Andy Attolini about the “evolution” of digital technology in architecture and design firms.

The Interview

(Anthony Frausto-Robledo) Can you elaborate on the transformative digital shift that the architecture industry underwent in the late ’80s and early ’90s and how it marked the beginning of a technologically enhanced era for architects?

(Andy Attolini) The architecture industry underwent a transformative digital shift during the late ’80s and early ’90s that reshaped the profession. During this time, architects started transitioning from physical paper-based documentation to digital formats, which improved document management, accessibility, and ease of sharing project information.

As you can imagine, the growing popularity of digital documentation led to the development of new architectural technologies. The introduction of Computer-Aided Design, or CAD, software allowed architects to create, modify, and store designs digitally. This ultimately increased precision and efficiency in the drafting and design processes, supplementing or replacing traditional hand-drawing methods.

3D modeling software also made an entrance into the market at this time, which revolutionized the way that architects conceptualized and presented designs to their clients and project partners. Despite the introduction of new technologies, it is important to note that this transformation was not universally adopted at once. While some firms embraced digital technologies immediately, many continued to rely on traditional methods well into the ’90s and some even into the early 2000s. 

Adoption cycles are long as different types of users slowly venture towards the new. How did the Great Recession serve as a tipping point for the adoption of 3D modeling and BIM tools in the architecture industry? What benefits do you feel these tools bring to architectural firms?

Although 3D modeling software existed prior to 2008, the Great Recession served as a tipping point for the architecture industry’s widespread adoption of 3D modeling tools, like SketchUp,  as well as Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, such as Archicad and Revit. 

One of NG+P’s residential projects is shown here in Autodesk Revit. Architect Andy Attolini says BIM workflows transformed the architecture industry and greatly impacted the communication of design to clients. It also brought about or forward a new generation of digitally savvy professionals, and design studios began to transform with new kinds of valuable skillsets. (Image: NG+P, All rights reserved.)

The economic downturn heavily impacted the profession, leading many firms to restructure their teams and technology, ultimately resulting in studios finding new ways to increase efficiency and remain competitive. As a result, the adoption and promotion of 3D modeling tools and BIM software quickly became a standard practice in the industry, transforming the way architects approached design and collaboration. This shift from 2D drawings to 3D models enhanced communication with clients and stakeholders by providing more immersive designs and creating increasingly realistic visualizations. Additionally, this led to an industry-wide shift in the workforce, bringing in new, digitally savvy professionals who were comfortable with modern design technologies. 

3D modeling tools expedited the design process, allowing architects to quickly create accurate building models, as well as present and revise designs more efficiently. Studios began to see significant efficiency gains in architectural processes as architects were able to visualize and iterate on designs more rapidly and accurately, ultimately reducing project timelines.

Like the Great Recession, industries went through another major transformative event. How did the COVID-19 pandemic accelerate the adoption of collaborative software tools in architectural practice? How did these tools facilitate communication among different parties during remote and hybrid work environments?

Similar to the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new wave of architectural technologies as designers embraced remote working environments. This new way of working accelerated the adoption of collaborative software tools, like Bluebeam, coupled with Zoom and similar video conferencing platforms, which facilitated communication among all project partners. 

Bluebeam and similar tools allow architects, engineers, contractors, and clients to collaborate on projects remotely by enabling real-time document sharing, markups, and discussions, making it possible to continue work despite physical distance. These tools also improved communication by providing features such as real-time screen sharing, live annotations, and digital collaboration boards, ensuring that project documents could be accessed securely from various locations.

Andy Attolini says that the COVID-19 pandemic changed design firms and brought about new digital means of communication. The firm relies on Zoom and Bluebeam for multi-stakeholder collaboration. In this example, side-by-side design iterations are shown and discussed.  (Image: NG+P, All rights reserved.)

Bluebeam, Zoom, and similar tools not only accelerated collaboration but also streamlined decision-making, maintained project momentum, and introduced more efficient and accessible ways of working that are likely to remain integral to the industry.

Looking forward, you mentioned that AI is the next frontier in the architecture industry. Could you discuss some early experiments or applications of AI tools that architects have been working on?

AI (artificial intelligence) is indeed the next frontier in the architecture industry, and architects have already been exploring various applications of AI tools to enhance their processes. One that comes to mind is an AI-powered generative design tool that can suggest multiple design options based on input criteria, such as site analysis, lot fit configurations, and project goals. Architects can then select the most promising designs from these AI-generated options, creating a great starting point for new project studies.

AI can also assist in optimizing designs by analyzing plans to increase energy efficiency by recommending changes to building materials, orientations, and systems to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact. AI can take this one step further, using algorithms to select the appropriate building materials based on key factors such as cost, sustainability, and performance criteria.

Lastly, I’ve seen a few AI tools already in existence that can aid architects with project management by predicting project timelines, budget overruns, and potential issues, allowing architects to proactively address challenges.

How might the integration of AI tools into architectural processes enhance creativity and design innovation while still preserving the human touch and aesthetic sensibilities?

I see AI as an additive to the design process and toolset but in no way a replacement for skills. Think of AI as an additional staff member that adds another level of scrutiny and information. It can be referenced for guidance to inform decision-making but is not the final decision-maker itself. Here are a few ways I believe AI and architects can work together to enhance the final work product:

• Augmented Creativity: AI can generate design suggestions that architects might not have considered, sparking new creative directions for designers to explore.
• Design Optimization: AI can assist in optimizing designs for efficiency and performance, freeing architects from tedious calculations and allowing them to focus on the artistic and conceptual aspects of their work.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: AI can provide architects with data-driven insights and recommendations, helping them make informed design choices while still allowing for artistic interpretation.
• Faster Iterations: AI can speed up the design iteration process, allowing architects to experiment with more ideas in less time and refine their designs more effectively.

Ultimately, AI serves as a valuable tool that can augment the architect’s capabilities, enabling them to balance creativity with practicality and efficiency in the design process. It serves as a powerful data-gathering and information-generating platform, complementing human expertise and empowering architects to push the boundaries of innovation while delivering functional and aesthetically pleasing designs.

Thanks for sharing your informed observations about how digital technologies are transforming the architecture industry. The evolution of these technologies is indeed remarkable and fascinating. 

You’re welcome, and thanks for covering our firm and story.

To see more of Newman Garrison + Partners, visit their website here.

The post Firm Profile: NG+P and the Evolution of Architectural Technology appeared first on Architosh.

Now he and his twin brother’s multi-disciplinary design firm—Frantom Designs—deliver transformed design workflows for their business partners and end clients and even have created new service offerings.

A Tech-Forward Design Firm

Frantom Designs, based in Richardson, Texas, is primarily a production housing home designer founded by Ronald Frantom, CPBD, and his twin brother. Their business journey began when they formed a custom contemporary metal furniture company out of high school. That business would evolve into motorcycle design and manufacturing, but Ronnie was always interested in home design.

“I was also always doing home design,” says Ronnie Frantom. “I always had an interest in architecture and furniture design, which led to our relationships with builders and developers doing production housing.”

Ronnie Frantom of Frantom Designs powers Autodesk Revit and Lumion as the main tools in his company’s architectural design workflows.

Ronnie was also interested in cutting-edge computing and pushing the envelope with software. “I started using Revit before Autodesk bought it,” he says, acknowledging his BIM chops. However, production housing developers weren’t initially so keen on 3D workflows back in the late 90s. “Still, it gave us a competitive edge,” adds Ronnie, “because the industry was still doing hand drafting and 2D CAD, and we were far beyond that.”

To gain a further edge, Ronnie turned to building his own computers. “I used to build my own PCs,” he says. “Nothing against Dell or HP or some of those other companies, but they just tend to come loaded with a bunch of things I don’t need or want on my workstation computers.”

A Faster Workstation Computer

A central frustration Ronnie was having, though, with his custom PC hardware only got out a little further than the software. “Hardware for a long time has been the limiting factor on 3D rendering and animation,” he says. “It would take a day or two back in the day to produce a really great animation.”

Things changed recently when Frantom Designs tested a BOXX workstation. “Only recently, with BOXX, has the hardware been put in the background where it is no longer a limiting factor. This would be the first time I really feel that way.”

MORE: Stantec gains faster multitasking AEC workflows with AMD Radeon PRO GPUs

Frantom Designs is now powering its design workflows with new BOXX APPEX A3 workstations powered by AMD Ryzen 7950X CPUs and AMD Radeon Pro GPUs. “BOXX is the only computer company that made me feel comfortable not building my own PCs,” adds Ronnie. “And they have built me a computer that I wouldn’t even build myself because I had not even gotten into liquid cooling technology yet.”

Winning The Work

As Frantom Designs has gained more work, Ronnie admits BOXX came along at the ideal time. “I no longer really have the time to build computers now,” he adds. Instead, the Frantom brothers are increasingly doing more with their 3D workflows for clients while creating more ‘value-add’ services they can offer clients.

“In many design meetings with clients, we were just looking at black and white Revit models until we fully rendered it at the end, but now with the BOXX workstations, we can bring clients into the conference room and work in realistic mode and that’s been very beneficial.” Increasing certainty with clients by getting more realistic in the visuals means clients understand their projects more completely.

With the volume production housing, Frantom Designs is now adding a new service powered by the BOXX workstations running Lumion. The typical way these projects run is the developers start building a model home, and as Ronnie Frantom explains, “we go out there and do what they call a ‘frame-walk’ and look at things that might be issues for the builders or discover better design options.”

With BOXX workstations, Frantom Designs has been able to transform workflows that benefit both end-user clients and production housing developers at the same time.

“But that’s an expensive time to make changes because it is always framed,” says Ronnie. “What we do now with our volume builders is we do what we call a ‘virtual walk’ and bring our Revit model into Lumion to explore it.” This yields the same benefits of the real physical walk but with the upside of lower costs to make design changes. “It’s like walking the house at sheetrock stage,” he adds, “but they can visualize the changes they want to make.”

Increasing certainty earlier benefits all Frantom Design’s clients, volume builders, or single-family clients alike. “Now, with the software handling this, we can charge something reasonable. And when we are showing them around [the model], we have eliminated that potential clunkiness to that experience,” Ronnie explains.

A view of the construction drawing work inside Autodesk Revit powered by Frantom Designs’ new BOXX workstations.

With production housing clients seeking efficient margins, it has always been important for Frantom Designs to deliver impactful design services at reasonable costs while simultaneously helping these clients add value to their businesses. “Renders used to take a long time with less powerful hardware,” says Brad Sanford, Technical Marketing Manager, BOXX Technologies, “The BOXX workstation really put the hardware in the background (less of a concern) and no longer limited their [Frantom’s] design work.”

With the higher-quality BOXX workstations outfitted by powerful chips from AMD, Frantom Designs has taken existing software workflows and increased their utility to the overall processes.

Why the AMD Chips

“In general, I have been very happy with the overall performance of the AMD GPUs,” says Ronnie. “It also comes down to budgets,” Ronnie explained that for years during his custom PC build days, he would always work with the same total budget and allocate specific funds for the GPU and get the very best AMD graphics card for that build.

His interest in the AMD professional GPUs began after his happiness with the AMD CPUs, back in his custom PC days. “Early on, I was using a competitor CPU and GPU, but AMD, in my opinion, just stepped up and took the fight to their competitor,” he says, speaking of the advent of the Ryzen CPUs.

Ronnie has been using Lumion for quite some time and noted that there was always this fear of crashing on his custom PCs because the visualization workflows took so long. “We were doing these very large multi-family projects with address-specific colors and materials for the neighborhood review board to approve,” he says. “These were on my hot-rod PCs that I had these issues, but my BOXX workstations are so much better. They keep up.”

Tuned for Demanding Pro Work

Frantom Designs’ BOXX APEXX A3 workstations are ideal for their specific workflows because they serve both the needs of high-frequency, singled-threaded performance with Autodesk Revit while leveraging multicores in the AMD Ryzen 7950X CPU with Lumion.

“The specific system that Frantom Designs chose is what I would call a cross-trainer,” says Brad Sanford, Technical Marketing Manager, BOXX Technologies, Inc. “It can do multiple sports, so to speak. In those cases where apps need a lot of cores, the system can deliver. But it still has a very high frequency—certainly the AMD Ryzen 7950X.”

A picture of AMD’s Ryzen 7950X CPU, an architectural leap for AMD that has led to AMD taking the performance crown away from the competition. Today, AMD’s Ryzen processors consistently top the benchmark performance charts and typically deliver higher performance per dollar than Intel’s fastest processors. The Ryzen line is noted for its excellent balance of single-core and multi-core performance, making it very suitable for combination Revit + Lumion workflows like at Frantom Designs.

Another advantage BOXX has over rival workstation vendors is their expertise in developing professional, industrial-grade workstations with liquid cooling so CPU frequencies can be performance-tuned higher than the standard maximum GHz rating.

“We use closed-loop liquid cooling—unlike the gaming system guys,” adds Brad. “And our motherboards are mounted upside down so that the bubbles in the liquid cooling system advantageously go in the right direction. This leads to better reliability.” Architosh learned that BOXX uses only Asetek coolers because they are more durable and last longer than competing liquid coolers.

BOXX custom-develops its own metal chassis and internal support structures. “And we test our systems for months,” adds Brad, “when new chips come out, we can safely determine how high frequencies can be elevated with liquid cooling and overclocking.”

An interesting fact about BOXX is that it develops and tests its computers using SOLIDWORKS. In other words, a liquid-cooled BOXX workstation will be running SOLIDWORKS, which simulates the thermal dynamics of a liquid-cooled BOXX workstation.

Closing Comments

“In the past, I’d been very excited to use the latest hardware in my PCs but ultimately disappointed when using the latest software because it would be using all of that new power and more. The whole experience was just about keeping up—never gaining,” says Ronnie.

“With BOXX and how they build their workstations with the high-end components—and where AMD is at with the processing power they deliver—that excitement is still there, says Ronnie, “even after many months. Even with the latest software.”

Postscript

For more information about AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series processors and their performance boosts for AEC design and engineering professionals, visit this AMD page devoted to the subject.  – https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-for-creators

The post Jumping Out In Front—How BOXX Workstations with AMD Processors Transformed Frantom Designs’ Creative Workflows appeared first on Architosh.

That’s when Robert Terry, Senior Designer at Stantec, realized he wanted to look into the new real-time interactive rendering tools like Lumion. “So I started researching software and did some quick models in SketchUp and some tests in Lumion,” he adds, “and it really opened my eyes to the benefits of that kind of technology.” 

Robert Terry of Stantec talks to Architosh about his new AMD Radeon PRO GPU-powered workflows in visualization. In this view, he is able to monitor performance metrics thanks to AMD Radeon PRO Driver software. (see more notes on that in the article below). (Image: Stantec / All rights reserved.)

That story took place about ten years ago, and Terry—a visualization expert at Stantec—says he hasn’t looked back, especially regarding searching for new technologies to speed up his visualization workflows. His latest enthusiasm is for AMD’s Radeon Pro graphics cards, which he says have transformed his workflows. 

The Covid Transition

During the global pandemic, Terry found himself working at home like just about everyone else in the world. Dell gave Terry a Dell Precision 5820 tower workstation to test out for the company. It shipped with an AMD Radeon PRO W5700 graphics card, a GPU that sits in the middle, in terms of performance, between two AMD GPUs Architosh reviewed not that long ago—the Radeon PRO W6400 and the Radeon PRO W6600. 

“The success of the story of testing out the Dell machine was the discovery that—even though it was a mid-level workstation and I’m more accustomed to higher-level workstations—when outfitted with the AMD Radeon PRO W5700, I was able to do things I could never do before,” says Terry. 

Terry’s new Dell machine easily bested his older office workstation with dual 32GB NVIDIA Quadro M6000 GPUs, and he used it from home throughout the Covid years. “It allowed me to work in a much more favorable manner,” he added, noting that he could run renderings in the background for the first time and still multitasks on key foreground applications.

An Eye-Opening Moment

“It was an eye-opening moment,” recalls Terry. “Prior to that, I hadn’t really known that was even possible,” he says. Typically, his workflow consisted of two separate pipelines that more or less had to be sequenced with big animation rendering overnight. 

“Here at the office, I have to plan out all the modeling and materials and the prep work I do in the production pipeline to get things ready for the rendering pipeline,” he adds. “Then the rendering work would happen overnight.” 

Terry’s workflow changed dramatically once he was able to truly multitask across a range of applications, including modeling and scene setup in 3ds Max, while simultaneously running GPU-powered Lumion renderings in the background. (Image: Stantec / All rights reserved.)

But the AMD Radeon PRO W5700 in the new Dell workstation could easily manage the GPU-based Lumion rendering workloads in the background while simultaneously allowing Terry to conduct modeling and materials and scene preparation work in the foreground in 3ds Max. “I couldn’t do that before in my old Nvidia-based system because once the system and GPU attacked the [Lumion] rendering, the rest of the system was basically just in ‘shut down’ mode for the most part,” he says. 

Smart Drivers and Optimization Management

Terry admits it isn’t just the power of the Radeon PRO W5700—though AMD’s latest professional GPUs offer highly optimized hardware to software acceleration technologies like its Viewport Boost technology. 

Lauding the Dell Precision on-board intelligence performance optimization software, Terry adds, “the Dell optimization technology was also helpful because it learned my workflow of how renderings were running on the GPU in the background, and yet there were multitasking foreground events that were important enough to run decently. The system would make smart adjustments to run this workflow better,” he says. 

A final rendering on a Stantec project. This is the typical type of excellent visualization work Terry produces as part of his visualization team at Stantec. (Image: Stantec / All rights reserved.)

And Terry finds great appreciation for AMD’s Radeon PRO drivers. “These drivers we get with the AMD cards are so capable; they are not like some little bandaid you can pop into your system to make things run a little better,” he adds, noting that he can utilize the driver to troubleshoot performance roadblocks as well as use the screen recording feature to record any new software tricks he wants to share with his team. And there are special performance monitoring and optimization settings, including Viewport Boost and others. 

Serving Clients like Disney

Robert Terry works out of the Orlando, Florida, Stantec office, specializing in themed entertainment and other hospitality project types. Serving some of the biggest names in this space, including Disney, Terry’s primary role is in what he calls “design assist” to the primary architect, landscape architect, or interior design teams. 

“I help visually communicate whatever the needs are for the design team,” he says. “I love making the pretty pictures, whether for the marketing or the design teams, but I think I get more joy out of developing the workflows that help bridge the gap between whatever visual blockage exists between the design team and the client.”

These workflows typically mean taking data from Revit and bringing it into 3ds Max, where he does his scene setup work, including any additional modeling, texturing, and materials and colors. Then he sends those scenes to Lumion for rendering in the background during the day or lets the big stuff and animations run overnight. 

While Lumion has been his go-to for rendering for about ten years, he also works with V-Ray, Enscape, Twinmotion, and Unreal Engine. “What I like about Max is that it can bring together so many other formats so that I can take in work done in SketchUp by some colleague or Rhino, and I can organize and set up the whole scene.” 

Another excellent sample of Robert Terry’s work at Stantec using his preferred workflow combining tools like 3ds Max and Lumion. (Image: Stantec / All rights reserved.)

With these diverse tool workflows, Terry feels his work life is entirely different now that he can multitask with renderings in the background on the GPU and modeling tools like Max running in the foreground on the CPU. 

And speaking of 3ds Max, this Autodesk tool has been dramatically accelerated by the Radeon PRO W5700 due to Viewport Boost. “On some large 13 million polygon models in Max, I was getting just 11 frames per second in the viewport, but now with Viewport Boost, I am getting 17 frames per second on those models, and I am really happy about that.”

All this efficiency gained in the new Dell workstation paired with the AMD Radeon PRO graphics card has led to game-changing efficiencies. 

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.) 

Title image credit: Stantec / Architosh. All rights reserved.

The post Stantec gains faster multitasking AEC workflows with AMD Radeon PRO GPUs. appeared first on Architosh.

“You don’t design a building that you like the look of and then strap on solar panels on the roof and build up the insulation really high and call it a day,” he says. Nor do you do what many architects do, practice “check-box” green design, and talk up sustainable design on the back of apparent associations (like solar panels). That effort will take you to something other than authentic leadership in designing low to carbon-zero buildings.

And Studio Partington has authentic leadership in sustainable design. They are not a firm that practices ‘innovation theater’ as defined in this noteworthy Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. In other words, they don’t simply make noise about sustainable design in outward ways; they do serious, inwardly directed research in sustainable design. And this all began for them because the firm developed rigor and expertise in one building type.

The Beginning: Efficient Floor Plates

“Within the office building world, it was very much driven by efficiency—making really efficient floor plates, maximizing net to gross areas, designing very efficient façade systems, and also minimizing operational energy because that makes it a more saleable office,” says Davis, who has been working with firm founder Richard Partington since the practice’s beginnings.

Colin Davis, Director at Studio Partington, a UK-based architecture firm. (Image: Studio Partington)

Davis explains that the firm’s early years in designing competitive market-ready commercial offices gave the firm a competency in rigor foreign to the housing market. “We found that skillset, that sort of rigor, didn’t really exist in developing housing schemes,” he adds. And while the global recession of 2008/2009 decelerated the need for new office space, the United Kingdom continued to have strong demand for new housing.

“We have always been interested in efficiencies in design, so that leads very naturally to sustainability,” says Davis.

Expertise: The Performance Gap

With the downturn in global architecture following the Great Recession, Studio Partington began delivering research and policy writing services for clients. “Because of the depth of knowledge acquired in commercial office buildings,” says Davis, “the policy writers were receptive to our experience in how to put buildings together.”

“One of the first research projects that Richard was involved in explored what has become known as the Performance Gap,” says Davis, explaining that “while the government may set these ambitious targets and architects design for them, energy-model their designs, and have them built after realized and tested, there is this gap.”

The performance gap is between what you expected to achieve and what you actually achieved. But how to understand this gap and why it presents itself despite best intentions would be best directed at one of the firm’s publications, like “Better Buildings: Learning from buildings in use,” published in 2017 and available in the RIBA Bookshop.

One of several publications from the research at Studio Partington.  (Image: Studio Partington)

“Maybe what sets us apart is our commitment to the first principles of sustainability,” says Davis, and this was also important to the policy writers who hired us. “Everybody in the practice shares an interest in understanding why a regulation or target exists,” he continues, “rather than just taking it at face value that it is the right thing to do.”

Digital Tools: Their Contribution to Leadership 

Studio Partington’s preferred digital CAD-BIM platform has remained the same since the firm’s beginning. “We have used Vectorworks for the whole life of the practice,” says Davis, “and it was for one very pragmatic reason: it ran on the Mac.”

“We like the Mac environment, but more specifically, it felt very intuitive to use.”

Davis explains that 25 years ago—long before BIM existed and became normative—what was important to the firm’s leaders was that they selected a CAD tool that enhanced and supported the firm’s particular workflows, processes, and needs.

“We liked the immediacy of Vectorworks. And it felt like a very direct replacement for a drawing board,” he adds. “But the software has grown and matured, and so have we.”

Today the firm is fully proficient in the BIM process. It utilizes the power and efficiency of the BIM model to hold, organize, and extricate data useful to the process of creating aesthetically and performatively successful architecture.

“I do think the ability to capture information graphically is a really great skill for architects to have,” says Davis, “and it’s often missing from research projects where the data might be great, but people haven’t really thought about how it is communicated.” It is here that Davis notes that Vectorworks’ historic strength in graphics capabilities shines for a firm like Studio Partington, where he notes, “our job as architects ultimately is one of communication.”

BIM and Sustainable Design

Davis says that when it comes to the firm’s design process, where leadership in sustainability is paramount, the first step is getting “first principles” executed correctly. This essentially boils down to passive design optimization and how the sun impacts a building’s energy performance and life outside a building.

Studio Partington is a full BIM practice that swiftly constructs 3D models in Vectorworks for quick energy analysis feedback and addresses what the firm calls first principles. (Image: Studio Partington)

“You can develop and test a massing model very quickly in Vectorworks, which has many advantages,” he adds, “like using the built-in Helidon Tool for shadow analysis. So, the spaces you have labeled as ‘park’ if you see they don’t get much sunlight, you know immediately you must adjust the design.”

Davis is enthusiastic as he talks about how the firm studies massing models swiftly in Vectorworks, increasing certainty in the critical aspects of design in these areas he calls first principles. Once these are established, the firm will most often produce advanced energy model analysis using PHPP (Passive House Planning Package) tool.

Derwenthorpe is one of the practice’s best-known projects in the UK, a rigorous example of sustainable housebuilding. The development is one of England’s first large-scale low-carbon communities. (Image: Studio Partington)

“We are quite keen on PHPP and are talking to the local [UK] Vectorworks people about integrating PHPP into Vectorworks,” says Davis. Tools like PHPP and the UK-government-sponsored tool SAP, are Excel-based. “We have a good debate in the office about ‘what is a model?’ because if you ask an architect what a model is, they think about a 3D geometry model,” he notes.

Before the BIM transition got underway for most architects in the UK, Davis says, “I had a preconceived vision of what BIM is, but in actuality, it is many other things than just a transparent 3D model with clash detection and things like that.”

Davis says, “a model can exist in many things. A 2D drawing can be a model. An economist will tell you their model is entirely in Excel. I think I am learning a bit about that, like the embodied carbon model—that is just collecting data and saying, ‘what can I now do with this data, how does it inform my design, and what kind of changes do I make?’ “

BIM: From Transition to Beautiful Renderings

Studio Partington has been using Vectorworks since before the BIM phase in AEC began. Like many architects, he acknowledged that the initial thought of adopting the BIM process seemed daunting.

“I suppose what made it much easier was we were already very familiar with the environment of Vectorworks,” he says. Because Vectorworks is a hybrid BIM/CAD software, it has afforded its longest adherents the luxury of transitioning to BIM in a more moderately paced process with more fallback control and less anxiety. “What we started with was what I would call a two-dimensional BIM deliverable, using all the intelligent components with data but not contending ourselves with the third dimension,” says Davis. Once the firm mastered that, adding the third dimension to their workflow was pretty easy.

The Brickyard project in East Ham is currently under construction and showcases the firm’s sustainable design expertise. (Image: Studio Partington)

“We have an external Vectorworks consultant that we work with who helped us establish our CAD standards from an early stage. Our 2D data was very well organized and managed, making the transition to BIM easier. People often ask us about our BIM transition,” he adds, “and I say, ‘don’t even think about that transition to 3D BIM until you have your 2D stuff nailed.’ “

“Now people in the office begin by saying, ‘we are going to get the model built,’ and everything starts from there,” he adds. “They really see efficiencies in delivering their work via that approach, and then you tack on all the value-added benefits like embodied carbon, data visualization, and architectural visualization.”

Embodied Carbon—The Brickyard Project

A great example of Studio Partington’s competencies in leading-edge sustainable design is in the Brickyard Project, a new three-block, mixed-use development in East Ham.

“We actually inherited this project from a better-known design practice,” says Davis, who talks about how Studio Partington took over and was tasked with completing the project. Originally the building was planned to be a CLT (timber-frame) structure, but along with the Grenfell Tower fire and the realization of how the CLT structure would work on top of the concrete frame, the project shifted to an all-concrete frame structure that actually had lower total embodied carbon than the original hybrid CLT and concrete podium design.

“Because of the way CLT works, it drops continuous line loads down through its structure,” says Davis. “And obviously, the concrete frame is working as a frame, a series of columns and slabs. So, the design required very large transfer structures—transferring line loads into frame loads.”

Studio Partington learned that it was possible to design a lighter all-concrete frame than a combined concrete podium and CLT timber frame. The total CO2 saved in this design decision was equal to over 1,000 transatlantic flights. (Image: Studio Partington)

Tasked also with looking at sustainability and carbon efficiency, Davis says his firm realized that they could design a more efficient all-concrete structure. “We started again with the design of a very efficient concrete frame that would work for a residential layout and a retail layout at the lower and ground levels,” he adds. “We found we could design a concrete structure that had less concrete than the hybrid timber-frame and concrete building.”

The results are pretty stunning, equating to reduced embodied carbon equal to 1,133 trans-Atlantic flights.

Final Thoughts: Nullius in Verba and the Road to Expertise

The Brickyard project is a story in intuitive contradiction. It reminds me of the motto of the Royal Society established in 1660: nullius in verba—take nobody’s word for it. Historian Joel Mokyr in his book, A Culture of Growth, attempts to answer the question of why Europe was the first region in the world to industrialize and focuses his answer on critical cultural thought led by such cultural entrepreneurs (his term) as Sir Francis Bacon. But the key is this: the ideas of free debate and free markets—combined constituted a break-away from dogmatic ideologies and a quest for infinite progress based on what Bacon called useful knowledge. 

Another rendering view of The Brickyard project. On the courtyard side, there are podium-level gardens with full access to sunlight. (Image: Studio Partington)

Talking to Colin Davis of Studio Partington reminds me of Mokyr’s book, especially of the values placed on freedom to explore new ways of working, the importance of measuring the physical world (embodied carbon), and the systematic approach to developing useful knowledge based on inductive methods.

This gets us back to the performance gap and the firm’s efforts to fully understand how these transpire, what effect they generate on carbon footprints (despite best attempts at sustainable design), and how to combat and close that gap via concentrated research and the application of that research to design.

Nullius in verba—take nobody’s word for it—also applies to the firm’s approach to BIM. “As a rule, I’d say we are not that detailed in our models,” says Davis, who advocates a less ideological approach to BIM. And by ideological, I mean the industry’s controlling viewpoint that getting as much as possible in the BIM model is somehow superior.

Davis says scale is relevant, meaning the scale of the drawings. “We tend to model to what is relevant, say 1:50,” he adds. “But where the model becomes very powerful is being able to interrogate it and understand where the complex junctions are. So, the BIM model gives a very good framework for where the complexity is and how we might handle it.” Davis says all of the detailed work is still handled in two dimensions.

Studio Partington, a UK-based practice.

Mies used to say, “God is in the details.” For Davis, the details—from the firm’s early start and recognition—have always been the pathway to expertise, recognition, and award-winning work.

The post First Principles and Vectorworks BIM Shine at UK-based Studio Partington appeared first on Architosh.

“We, as a country, do about 5,000 per year,” says Rand, “so we need to do ten times more, and the only way we are going to achieve that is through technology.” Rand is focused on a panelization approach whereby highly insulative materials are layered between construction-grade plywood or competitive material systems, and openings for windows are fully factored into the panels and their layout back at the factory.

Habit Studio — Passive House Experts

Habit Studio is a small architecture practice led by firm founders Lorrie Rand and Judyann Obersi. The two met in architecture school at Dalhousie University and have built a thriving small practice in the fastest-growing part of Canada.

Habit Studio’s “Two Rocks” project is a Passive House retrofit in Novia Scotia. (Image: Chris J. Dickson for Habit Studio)

“We’re having a big building boom,” says Rand. “Canada is in general, but Halifax, here in Novia Scotia, is growing at the fastest pace in the country.”

Like in the United States just south, part of the growth in the Canadian Maritimes is a retreat from urban cities, an effect of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Couple that with new remote work trends, and it is easy to understand the recent growth spurt for Habit Studios.

Lorrie Rand is a Certified Passive House Designer and has an educational background in physics with a Bachelor of Environmental Design Studies from Dalhousie University.

“I definitely lean towards the building science side of things,” she says. “Even when I was going to school for physics, I wanted to go to architecture school.”

The firm began its venture into energy house experts slowly, explains Rand, who noted that in addition to the long, frigid winters up in Canada, the Nova Scotia region has costly electricity. “So, we have had for a long time some pretty great incentives for sustainability in our province,” noting that Nova Scotia tends to be one of the leading providences in the country for adopting the latest energy standards and building codes.

“Clients started asking for Passive House designs before we had truly formed Habit Studio officially,” she says. When the firm began its first certified Passive House project, Rand and her team benefitted from two parallel developments—a growing suite of new builders skilled in building Passive Houses and a regional government agency’s interest and pickup of their firm Passive House story.

“It led to some publicity for us as a firm,” she adds. Bolstered by that success, Habit Studio’s second Passive House design turned out to roughly cost the same as conventional construction yet would operate at much less cost in terms of energy consumption.

“We decided that if we can do it for the exact same cost as a regular house, then we are not going to do anything but Passive House commissions,” says Rand. As it turns out, their concerns that such a declaration may lead to less work had the opposite effect. “We ended up convincing more people of the benefits of Passive House design,” she adds.

From that point on, the all-women-run design firm has crafted an award-winning reputation for sustainable design-forward architecture in the residential market with project coverage in notable media outlets like ArchDaily, e-Architect, SABMag, and Canadian Architecture.

Passive and BIM

Coupled with real-life expertise and specialized training, Habit Studio’s methods for designing highly performant buildings involve a collaborative and client-engaged design process with BIM at its center.

Isabelle Gosselin is the firm’s BIM Lead and came to the practice several years ago from the Drafting-Architectural program at Nova Scotia Community College. Her skill set and training allowed her to upskill Habit Studio’s staff from an essentially 2D with some occasional 3D modeling in SketchUp to a robust and growing BIM workflow in Vectorworks Architect.

BIM models greatly aid accurate material and assembly layer take-offs which get passed through the energy modeling process. (click for larger view)

“Lorrie was already very good with Vectorworks,” says Gosselin. “When I joined, I recommended that they move to a 3D BIM workflow because I had a very good understanding of what was capable in Vectorworks.”

Having been drawn to the firm since graduating from her program at Nova Scotia Community College, Gosselin quickly converted her Autodesk Revit and AutoCAD skills to Vectorworks Architect. “There were great resources for learning and advancing, including Vectorworks University,” adds Gosselin. “I’m really also appreciative of the relationship between Vectorworks and their users,” she adds, noting that in addition to personal training delivered to the firm, suggestions for specific tools have actually turned into new features in the latest versions of Vectorworks.

Graphics override capabilities in Vectorworks allow BIM models to convert to 3D information graphics, greatly aiding client and contractor understanding of a chosen aspect of a building project. (click for larger view)

Lorrie Rand notes, “Before BIM in Vectorworks, my previous ten-year workflow was to draw the house in Vectorworks and create a 3D model in SketchUp so I can run a SketchUp plugin to extract data I need for the energy modeling process. That’s a lot of duplicate work,” she adds.

“Now Isabelle can pull out all the data I need from the BIM model,” she adds. Data on areas and volumes are extracted and organized into Vectorworks Worksheets and Excel. Lorrie Rand does all the energy analysis and optimization for Passive House using an Excel-based tool and process called Passive House Planning Package (PHPP).

Boosting Technologies

Isabelle Gosselin is a naturally inclined technology booster at the firm, constantly learning about what features in Vectorworks can be deployed and how she can further streamline the small firm’s workflows.

“I feel like every six months, Isabelle has evolved us up another level of sophistication in our workflows,” says Rand. “Still, there is much progress to be done, and technologies are never stopping but always progressing.”

Gosselin says that Vectorworks and Energos are both technologies that the firm is looking to explore to advance energy-conscious design further, with a particular need to address the earliest stages of design. “Not everyone wants to live in a cube,” jokes Rand, noting that the optimal shape for a Passive House is a basic rectangular cube. “What we are looking for from Vectorworks in the future is to find out if particular designs are viable early on before we start putting in all the data needed for full energy analysis,” adds Gosselin.

An interview view of the project Two Rocks, a Passive House retrofit project by Habit Studio in Novia Scotia. (Image: Chris J. Dickson for Habit Studio)

One additional benefit of an all-BIM process in Vectorworks is its tight integration with the Twinmotion 3D rendering and animation application. Gosselin says the firm is benefitting from the greater realism produced by Twinmotion. However, there are learning lessons from rapid changes in workflows.

Rand notes that clients benefit from BIM because many don’t really understand what they are looking at in flat 2D drawings. 3D BIM solves that understanding problem. However, Gosselin notes that BIM is a bit of a double-edged sword because once clients experience an interactive 3D presentation, they can ask for higher modeling fidelity levels that project budgets can’t afford.

“We are working on communicating our deliverables, ” Rand says. “Our processes have evolved in a very short amount of time,” adds Gosselin, “so as we see trends in how our clients are responding to our process where they are asking for more layers of information in the models, we realize we need to maybe deliver examples to clients.”

Final Thoughts

Another type of example Habit Studios is working to set is retrofit panelization for homes. “It is something that is weighing on us because we are retrofit experts but know that the way we currently do things is never going to allow Canada to meet its climate goals,” says Rand.

She says there are a handful of companies specializing in panelization for new builds, and Habit Studios is engaging with them to look at how they would tackle retrofits. “It’s one of the hardest things to do,” she adds, “because how do you build a new thing that sits on a wonky base—none of the old structures are square.”

Rand says this will take the use of new technologies linking up all the elements and factors, from the old building to be retrofit to the digital tools to the industrial construction techniques of panelization. They are hoping Vectorworks advances to aid them in this process. For now, Gosselin says, “I really love Vectorworks and tend to think of it as a hybrid between Revit and AutoCAD,” offering what she says is less restriction and more agility.

It will take agility for Habit Studios to discover ways to advance local expertise in panelization, working to meet Canadian climate goals, and solving client retrofit needs simultaneously. The good news is that the firm’s BIM transition process is making them more agile, as a matter of course, giving them an edge to take on such significant problems.

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: JPW / Architosh. All rights reserved.) 

Title image credit: Chris J. Dickson for Habit Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.

The post Slowing the Climate Crisis—Habit Studio Firm Profile appeared first on Architosh.

Diversified

GKV is an architecture and interiors design firm based in New York City. The three founding partners were principals at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. “We already had an understanding of development and developer requirements to satisfy larger projects,” says Gerner. “So, we slowly ramped up, and three years into our practice, we had our first 250,000 square foot bank building.”

The firm believes that a building is designed from both the inside out and outside in, and has a robust interiors design practice. Gerner adds, “In parallel with our shell and core business, the interiors practice has enabled us to diversify and handle recessions better.”

ARC is a new 10-story mixed-use building located in Long Island City and designed with a retro industrial look to fit beautifully into is neighborhood context. The award-winning building is just one of GKV’s many examples of the firm’s diversity in building and occupancy typologies. (Image: GKV / Architosh. All rights reserved.) Click for a larger view, typical of all images.

In addition to its shell and core and interiors business, the firm has established expertise in historic preservation and adaptive reuse, in addition to healthcare, education, and residential design at multiple scales. These market domains are now cross-pollinating as consumers and businesses adapt to modern life. And nothing has transformed modern life like the COVID-19 global pandemic.

“Over the past decade or so, there has been a strong interest in bringing the environment of the office space home,” says Gerner, “and the last two years have really put it to the test.”

“This has also been true of the hospitality sector, where you try to create the home away from home, but you can also try to create the office away from home in many cases,” he adds. 

Adaptive Capacity & BIM

With different practice domains cutting across scales and building types, I asked Randy Gerner what technologies fortify their practice for such diversification.

Not surprisingly, many of their projects are not developed using BIM methodology, reflecting the logic and economics of the firm’s market sectors.

“The way we decide if a project will be BIM or not is we look at how it will be executed from the construction side,” says Gerner. “The construction industry is still slow to adopt or take up BIM technology,” he adds, noting that, of course, the larger companies have BIM groups. Still, many of their projects, including sizeable ones, are built by mid-sized or smaller general contractors.

“These guys say, ‘give me a set of 2D drawings, and I will build it,’ and similarly, the building departments throughout the United States also don’t care about BIM. It’s not important to them,” he adds.

However, Randy Gerner says that his firm is fully proficient in Level 300 BIM-based practice and has many large projects executed fully in BIM under their belt. The firm’s main design, 3D modeling, and BIM platform is Vectorworks Architect, and the software has provided the firm with a level of agility perfectly suited for its organic growth path.

That path now includes the firm’s growing expertise in modular construction.

Modular Construction

Gerner says that the firm has designed more than three major modular construction projects. Its latest design is the first multi-family mixed-use modular building planned for Providence, Rhode Island.

A 12-story residential building with 148 units, the downtown Providence building is typical of the podium below modular units construction method, mixing conventional construction at the podium and foundation level with modular above.

The 12-story mixed-use residential building for downtown Providence, Rhode Island would be the first such modular construction (MC) structure in the colonial era city. (Image: GKV / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“We have already honed many of the techniques for designing and building modular construction,” says Gerner, who notes that the design approach for modular buildings is fundamentally different than for conventional construction.

“When designing a modular building project, an architect must think differently from a project that is considered conventional construction,” says Gerner. “The drawings that we produce need to be shared with a modular manufacturer and form the basis for further development by the manufacturer.”

Gerner says that each modular construction manufacturer utilizes a proprietary system for its manufacturing methods. “This does create some challenge for us since we are faced with having to develop a generic design solution for the building.” He notes that load-bearing systems vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some units use light-gauge cage-like construction and are self-bearing, while others work in strategically-located columns. This variance means floor plans require adjustment once a modular construction company wins the contract.

Hybrid Needs

While noting that modular construction can speed up overall build times, reducing construction phase work by 25 percent, the overall process is different. “It’s complicated. What we find is we spend a great deal more time in design development with modular and less time in construction documents and more time in CA (construction administration),” says Gerner.

This multi-family structure at Friendship Street is another modular construction design by GKV. You can notice the way the corners of the building have clear sides and glazed fronts and how modular designed buildings consist of repeatable modular units that technical stack on top of each other. (Image: GKV / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The hybrid nature of modular means that the podium and foundational parts of the building are conventionally built design and documentation needs are conventional for that segment of the building. Simultaneously, the modular floors above the podium are more generically developed, coupled with high-level performance specifications. The modular manufacturer will create high-level 3D documentation to drive their manufacturing production.

Gerner says, “It is next to impossible to pivot from one manufacturer to another since the manufacturing systems for each is different.” This is why the process is so different and specialized.

Vectorworks’ Agility

Vectorworks’ adaptive capacity and agility have been utilized from the firm’s beginning. Gerner says he has been using the software since the KPF days when it was called MiniCAD.

The platform gives his firm hardware flexibility that rival systems do not. “So, we really enjoy working on the Apple platform,” he adds. “We have always liked our Macs and don’t want to give them up.” Still, through Apple’s dark days in the late 90s and early 00s, Gerner did note the added pressure at times. Then there were the clients who came along, though rare, who demanded a project be developed as BIM projects using Revit.

When this happened, Gerner says his firm reached out to Vectorworks, insisting that they did not want to give up their Mac-platform office to “fit in” with a perceived standard that was less agile for their practice needs. Vectorworks’ BIM advancements over the past few years, along with direct assistance to the firm, have kept GKV very happy.

“We can fully stay up to speed in an industry migrating to BIM,” he says, noting that “Vectorworks’ support has enabled that, and they have been fabulous to us. This has allowed us to use our Mac computers—which we love—and design big and expensive buildings and communicate with our many BIM consultants.”

The Beekman Residential Tower is a 51-story tower addition to the historic 1881 Romanesque neoclassic Temple Court building. (Image: GKV / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

And for our hybrid and diversified needs, including modular construction design, Vectorworks’ flexibility adds economic efficiency enabling teams to decide if a given project is best suited for a BIM workflow or a non-BIM workflow.” And as for modular, Randy Gerner adds, “I don’t know if Vectorworks has specifically focused on the modular industry requirements, but the software has adapted very well to those requirements.”

“Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) is still in its infancy here in the United States,” says Gerner. “The idea is that a building design should seamlessly evolve from concept to 3D model to manufacturing drawings to the final manufactured product. Right now, through Vectorworks, we possess the tools to translate the idea into a 3D model. That model can then be shared with the modular building manufacturer.”

“It is always difficult to predict the future and specifically trends in architecture,” says Gerner. “However if you have a flexible design format such as Vectorworks, our company can evolve seamlessly with the advancing technologies of the construction industry.”

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“It was Friday the 13th when the office called me and said we were going to go remote,” recounts Joe Marshall, AIA, senior associate at mid-sized Boston-based practice Flansburgh Architects. “I was already home because of my kids, and there were just two people—the receptionists and marketing—who had an iMac, and all we had to do was sync their computers over to a couple of laptops we had.”

Flansburgh moved swiftly to a pandemic footing due in part to a series of technology decisions the firm made years before. Essentially everyone at the 28-person practice was already on a firm-provided Mac laptop. All their data had already been in the cloud, and the firm had set up Zoom as their full-suite communications system—meaning phone to virtual meetings. “The company just had to pay for increasing home Internet speeds,” says Brian Hores, AIA, architect and senior BIM Manager at Flansburgh. “We basically had no transition other than just not being together,” says Marshall.

While tens of thousands of other architecture firms worldwide went through painful technology adjustments to adapt to remote work, Flansburgh had some inherent advantages beyond their streamlined IT decisions. International practice made them agile many years prior.

Flansburgh—Their Work and History

Flansburgh, founded in 1963 in Boston, has always focused on academic architecture, and K-12 schools are their bread-and-butter projects. However, the award-winning architecture firm has expanded through the years to designing international schools abroad.

The American School of Zagreb, Croatia, winner of the 2019 Boston Society of Architects Honor Award for Design Excellence. (Image: Flansburgh / All rights reserved ) (click for larger image, typical)

The American International School of Zagreb, in Croatia, is a recent example. The project won a 2019 Boston Society of Architects (BSA) Honor Award for Design Excellence and consisted of 90,000 square feet of new structure with an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Certified A+. The firm has similar projects worldwide, from Beirut, Lebanon, to Guatemala City in Central American to Johannesburg, South Africa.

Flansburgh has developed advanced design competencies in academic building types, educational campus master planning, and similar specialty-type buildings like performance centers. “Our focus has been on serving mission-driven clients,” says Marshall. “Civic, cultural, and educational institutions are the types of clients that resonate with us—it’s rewarding to work on architecture that supports a non-profit mission.”

A Lean Tech Stack

The reader may be curious how a 28-person firm can handle such large projects on multiple continents with so few people. Joe Marshall explains that they are working with local architects of record with their foreign projects, and Flansburgh is the design architect. But in the US, the firm is usually the architect of record.

International College – Ras Beirut Elementary School, Beirut, Lebanon. (Image: Flansburgh / All rights reserved )

The firm is also highly organized and focused on gaining new efficiencies through a reasonably structured process. “Every year, we try to do an information technology initiative and a design technology initiative,” says Marshall, noting that the two are not the same thing. Moving their phone system to Zoom, for example, was an example of the former, so too was the decision to staff the entire office with Mac laptops. Building out their internal rendering pipeline from Vectorworks Architect to Twinmotion was an example of the latter type of initiative.

The International College Campus in Beirut, Lebanon, as a 3D BIM model generated in Vectorworks. (Image: Flansburgh / All rights reserved )

This A-B initiative process recalls the famous “tick-tock” rhythm of semiconductor development whereby a company like Intel would move its current chip architecture to a smaller manufacturing process technology (shrinking) known as the “tick” and follow that up with a new microarchitecture which introduced innovations known as the “tock.”

Not wanting to stretch this analogy too far, Flansburgh’s design technology initiatives are akin to the “tock” stage wherein new technology formations using new tools provide the firm new capabilities (like the VR they are working on with The Wild). Similarly, the “tick” stage focuses on IT infrastructure and acceleration—propelling the firm’s design processes by making them inherently faster.

International College – Ras Beirut Elementary School, Beirut, Lebanon. (Image: Flansburgh / All rights reserved )

Marshall and Hores describe the mid-sized firm’s technology approach in lean terms, speaking about streamlining and keeping technology as simple as possible at first and allowing more complexity as warranted.

Technically, the firm utilizes Synology NAS technology in combination with prominent cloud storage providers in Dropbox and Google Drive. All of their data is synced automatically across multiple clouds and on-premise NAS units. The main office has a fiber backbone connection to the Internet, and the firm provides near fiber-level Internet speeds for employees at their homes.

“Our view is that technology is cheap. Our entire technology budget is like the cost of an employee,” says Marshall, who emphasizes that dedicated fiber for an office of 28 may sound like overkill, but as he says, “I would rather it be overkill than wasting people’s time.”

Jacob’s Pillow Dance, Perles Family Studio. Exterior view. (Image: Flansburgh / All rights reserved )

The same is true of hardware, where their tech-consultant configures what they call a “hero build” for their laptops. These intelligent technology decisions played essential roles in how the firm adapted to the global pandemic in 2020. When it was time to work from home, staff just took their MacBook computers with them at the end of the day like they do when flying to Europe or Africa for a meeting.

Flansburgh Architects has long been an all-Mac office. “The Mac was an early decision in our digital infrastructure, and we have never looked back,” says Marshall, who adds, “that is one of the reasons why we started with Vectorworks.”

next page: Lean and Agile — Vectorworks for BIM

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The Journey to BIM

Lenzen is making the journey to BIM, and he is now fairly far along in the process. His Florida-based firm’s name, studioCOLAB, doesn’t hint at Lenzen’s own multi-discipline background, but the “studio” part does reflect his artistic interests and background.

With a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Saint Louis University, he began professional life in the medical field before pursuing more artistic directions, eventually leading him to a graduate program in architecture at the  Washington University in St. Louis. A native of Chicago suburbs, after receiving his master’s degree in architecture, he moved to Florida, where the environmental conditions were nearly the inverse of his hometown. This prompted his interest in environmentally responsive design, which led him down the BIM path in small steps.

“Florida is rather easy to know what to design for,” he comments, noting that down in the sunny state, you only have essentially two months where you need mechanical heating. “It’s all about the heat and humidity and keeping the sun from entering through your windows and doors in the summer.” So, designing for cooling and humidity is a big challenge for architects in Florida.

studioCOLAB has recently made the jump to BIM, traveling from 2D AutoCAD to Vectorworks Architect with a temporary stop at Revit. Critical to this Florida firms’ work using 3D BIM is to communicate ideas about indoor-outdoor living while successfully managing environmental challenges unique to the hot Florida weather. (Image: studioCOLAB / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“The key is in doing good 3D modeling where you can accurately study the light and do sun studies,” he says, describing his pathway to BIM. With a BIM model, you can easily locate that virtual building on the actual site, geolocated in the software where dynamic and real-time sun-studies can be easily generated for any time-segment of the year. Such studies help Lenzen confirm his design intuition about sunlight but offer heuristic feedback and affordances that Lenzen then uses to advance the design in directions he might not have thought about if his work was all done in 2D CAD drawings alone.

Breaking free of a pure 2D workflow was a key goal in Lenzen’s design to launch his own practice. “We do a lot of commercial and residential projects,” he says, “and affordable living is important to me. I want to be able to make spaces that use light, textures, and colors that make people really stop and pause about the space they find themselves in.” Lenzen doesn’t believe that luxury living spaces necessarily must cost a lot; he feels that good architecture accomplishes luxurious spatial conditions like drawing the landscape into the building, make connections visually to the particulars of the site, and establishing proper flows between spaces, both inside and out.

studioCOLAB says the softness of Vectorworks rendering options is an appealing feature of the program. These “white model” rendering modes are a default feature in Vectorworks and useful for schematic design stages where color and material decisions are not yet fixed. In this view, the architect is using images of materials in a “digital material board” format. (Image: studioCOLAB / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

While he started professionally in the world of 2D CAD with Autodesk AutoCAD, he slowly moved towards more 3D workflows, passing through to Autodesk Architectural Desktop on route to Autodesk Revit, where he has spent a good deal of time. He has also used Trimble’s SketchUp along the way.

The Visual Qualities of Vectorworks

Now, Lenzen is using Vectorworks Architect where he prefers having a single comprehensive software package. “Vectorworks Architect has these default orthogonal views of the BIM model that have this really nice look to them—like no other software I have seen,” he says. “In Revit, the model views are black and white, look a bit harsh, and don’t have that softness; Vectorworks’ 3D BIM models are softer, more human, and less technical looking. That really matters to my clients.”

Lenzen also prefers the diversified and default rendering modes in Vectorworks Architect. “Just out of the box, the rendering quality in these default views are really nice,” he adds. He continues to explain how he makes good use of the white model render mode as well.

It was Vectorworks’ graphics qualities that first grabbed Lenzen’s attention while he was working with other platforms and researching every solution in the industry. “The big factor in deciding to switch was every time I looked at a drawing done in Vectorworks, they were just beautiful,” he says. “Looking at the landscape drawings that users create and seeing how beautiful they are…it’s like having a page-layout software like InDesign inside your CAD program.” He added, “you can set up your drawings just as beautifully as you hope your designed buildings will be.”

“I’m a designer,” he emphasizes, “and I like to design everything! This means designing the way the page layout works, designing how the text looks—and Vectorworks makes this easy.”

BIM Notes

Lenzen is still on his BIM journey, which began with Revit. I asked him if he felt he was doing Little BIM or Big BIM, and he said he was doing three-quarter BIM. He models his buildings to a high degree of detail but stops shy of that point of diminishing returns. He says that when switching over to 2D for detailing, Revit and Vectorworks’ comparisons get harder, as they both offer strong detailing tools.

“If folks are coming from AutoCAD, they may find it easier to go to Vectorworks for BIM versus Revit for BIM,” he says, “because AutoCAD users will relate to the Vectorworks file structure.” He mentioned that AutoCAD layers are simply Vectorworks classes, for example, and a typical AutoCAD user will understand that. He also noted that going to BIM must happen in steps and that doing so enables firms to prevent that drastic loss in productivity time, while also scaling up BIM competency across a firm.

studioCOLAB says they love how Vectorworks is like a page-layout application like Adobe InDesign, giving them the flexibility to create project sheets and design boards combining traditional CAD views, 3D BIM views in both rendered and wireframe models, plus images with all with liberal text formatting capabilities. (Image: studioCOLAB / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“AutoCAD users can move over to Vectorworks and maintain their existing 2D workflows while they stage their transitions to BIM,” he added.

Back to his three-quarter BIM designation, he admits that he has yet to integrate IFC models from consultants as his consultants are still using AutoCAD for 2D design and documentation. However, he is utilizing schedules, sections, and elevations all from the 3D BIM model.

Looking Ahead

Lenzen has an interest in augmented reality (AR) and owns a 360-degree camera. “I am really trying to get into AR and point clouds,” he says, “and bring them into Vectorworks.” He flies a drone on his projects and looks forward to when computing processing power gets good enough that he will be able to merge AR technology with 360-degree photography so he can blend his architectural designs seamlessly with his projects’ tropical Florida sites.

In the meantime, he’s continuing to communicate his designs in BIM with Vectorworks, rendering out his visions for his clients in that softness he has grown so fond of in the program.

Sketch to BIM

To learn more about Vectorworks and why studioCOLAB feels it is the ultimate sketch to BIM software visit this link here.

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: Itten+Brechbühl / Architosh. All rights reserved.)  Non-credited images are copyrighted to Architosh.

Title Credit:  ( Image: studioCOLAB / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The post A Journey to BIM—Dialing in Softness with Sun Path Precision appeared first on Architosh.

This contrasts strongly with how learning environments like traditional 20th-century schools were formulated. Firm founder and creative director Rosan Bosch says in her inspirational TEDx talk that we can positively change society by starting with the design of schools. In a school designed by her studio, students inhabit a boldly different kind of set of spaces, in sharp contrast to repetitive classrooms and arrayed desks.

The six principles for Rosan Bosch Studio are actually spatial types that connect learning situations to distinct physical frameworks. Mountain Top, Cave, Campfire, Watering Hole, Hands-On, and Movement all describe these frameworks and how “design for learning,” positions the environment to support pedagogical goals. For example, in the Cave learning situation, the goal is to create a space that fosters and supports individual concentration, focus, and reflection. In the Watering Hole space type, learners come together haphazardly and encounter disruption and serendipity—the exact ideas that Steve Jobs espoused for his circular and new Apple headquarters—that bring about surprising new knowledge that fosters inspiration and motivation. 

Architect Jeppe Kleinheinz talks to Architosh about Rosan Bosch Studio’s work and processes. (Image: Agnete Schlichkrull for Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

All six principles—these spatial frameworks for learning—work together in various combinations and at various scales. “Each of them has their own life story, and it’s about how these types of spaces are linked to how we learn,” adds Kleinheinz. “The interesting thing about them is how they are combining ‘what is a learning situation?’—how do you learn?—with how can we shape the spaces in which you learn?” These key basic questions are continually refined, answered, and further refined in each new project.

An International Game-Changer

From her inspirational talks to the firm’s award-winning output, Rosan Bosch—who started her professional career as an artist—and her Copenhagen-based firm has designed innovative learning environments from Europe to Asia. The studio itself imbues much of the ethos the firm’s work seeks to create for each new project. 

The playful learning landscape of St. Andrew’s Scots School activates the school’s Scottish heritage and sets the framework for students’ growth and development. (Image: Kim Wendt for Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Notable projects for young learners include St. Andrew’s Scots School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the Western Academy of Beijing, China. In the former, the Scottish landscape serves as a powerful metaphorical canvas for the six principles. 

While educational settings for young learners is what Rosan Bosch Studio is known for, the design firm—an interdisciplinary team that contains architects, interior designers, graphic designers, and a pedagogical specialist—also does related spaces like libraries and corporate spaces. When I asked how the firm branched into working for such global elite names like LEGO and VELUX, Kleinheinz explained, “Yes, the idea of the use of space as a tool for change is not limited to education.” The firm engages with corporate and non-corporate non-educational clients who have an awareness and understanding of how space impacts behavior. 

Areas for focused work at St. Andrew’s Scots School. (Image: Kim Wendt for Rosan Bosch Studio / All rights reserved.)

Cave metaphor spaces at St. Andrew’s Scots School. (Image: Kim Wendt for Rosan Bosch Studio / All rights reserved.)

The Scottish highlands metaphor activate the school’s Scottish heritage. (Image: Kim Wendt for Rosan Bosch Studio / All rights reserved.)

One of those corporate clients is LEGO, one of the world’s leading toy developers. The Danish global giant sought out Rosan Bosch Studio to redesign LEGO PMD, and the innovative final result was featured across numerous design publications. 

Their Process

Their design process often begins with the six principles and the firm’s research and knowledge that inform them. “We have this pitch, really a PowerPoint, and we conduct workshops where we have 15-30 people engaged in the whole process,” says Kleinheinz, who adds that icons for the six principles are used throughout the visuals and that these are further tied to various 2D and 3D graphics and images that reference the learning situations that are associated with them. 

The innovative learning environments at the Western Academy of Beijing enhance student agency and support project-based learning. (Image: Kim Wendt for Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“We do a lot of co-creation processes with the people in the workshops, where the participants have to build their own Mountain Top ideas,” he says. To help prepare the materials for these workshops, Kleinheinz says the firm utilizes software tools from Adobe to Vectorworks. They will also use small films which are orchestrated with the help of a consultant. 

During the coronavirus pandemic, Rosan Bosch Studio has begun tapping into the power of virtual reality (VR) because the distance restraints placed on everyone at this time dictate alternate approaches where physical workshops won’t work now. All of these 3D requirements can be handled by their main software design tool, Vectorworks. 

“For the preparation of the workshop material, we have certain elements we draw on,” he adds, “and an interesting thing about Vectorworks is that we can go from a very diagrammatic way of showing the principles to more detailed spatial presentations of the concepts.”

Forming landscapes in learning environments with variable height objects. Design and detailing work in Vectorworks. (Image: Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“We can also go directly into the working drawings in the same software tool from these earlier presentations,” he says, noting how flexible Vectorworks software is in supporting their entire process workflow. “I think an interesting thing in our approach is that we can say to our clients we take it all the way.” 

The Process in Detail

Kleinheinz says that Rosan Bosch Studio’s process is structured but avoids being formulaic. They begin in earnest by discussing the project’s goals with the teachers and school. Also, many educational projects are taking place within existing structures, so the chance to design a brand new educational setting from the ground-up is quite rare. The firm has high competencies in working within existing spaces and structures. 

Basaltic columns are shown in a construction drawing produced in Vectorworks. (Image: Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Typically, their school projects take nine months from initiation to having the materials and documents ready for tendering. “If it is just new furniture, it can take as little as one month,” he says, “but often it is related to some refurbishment, and that can take two to three months.”

One can’t help but marvel over some of the fun-looking custom furniture elements in a Rosan Bosch Studio learning environment. You are tempted to think: if only I went to a school like that.

The Rosan Bosch Studio embodies many of the attributes of their learning environments. (Image: Agnete Schlichkrull for Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Many of these elements with upholstery finishes are actually acquired furniture items, but Rosan Bosch Studio typically mixes custom elements into every project mix. “The client also expects the special elements,” he adds, “so it is always a combination of custom elements that are developed from our background of how these elements support the principles, like Mountain Top and Watering Hole.” 

Kleinheinz says the firm uses Vectorworks to design many of these custom furniture pieces, but sometimes other tools are used. “The advantage of doing these pieces in Vectorworks,” he says, “is we would have it in 2D plan view as well as 3D views—helpful for when we move onto shop drawing reviews for the tendering.” 

As for BIM, Rosan Bosch Studio isn’t typically mandated to utilize a BIM process. “BIM is not normally required for interior projects that we are working on,” he says. “Sometimes when other architects are involved, and there is a new building, or it is like a public project in Denmark, then we engage in a BIM process to fit the needs of the larger team.” At that point, Vectorworks’ 3D capabilities become more vital, and the firm has staff with strong BIM competencies to lead that integrative work into a full BIM project. 

Rosan Bosch, artist, creator, and innovator, leads her studio on projects around the world. You can watch her TEDx talk here. (Image: Agnete Schlichkrull for Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Kleinheinz says the firm won’t do all their work in 3D even if it fits into a BIM process, but every project regardless has the special elements designed in 3D. “As I mentioned earlier, Vectorworks is a kind of hybrid tool that is both good at 2D and 3D,” he says. He emphasizes that in just one software tool, they can attain the graphical visual levels they seek, the ability to take things into 3D and visualize spaces, and then the ability to take things into production drawings and manage to tender. 

“So it is these hybrid strengths of Vectorworks…that is why we have decided to go with this program.” 

Ultimate Interior Design Software

To learn more about Vectorworks’ ultimate design software for interiors, visit vectorworks.net/start/interiors.

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: Itten+Brechbühl / Architosh. All rights reserved.)  Non-credited images are copyrighted to Architosh.

Title Credit:  ( Image: Kim Wendt for Rosan Bosch Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The post From Mountain Top to Watering Hole — The Design Work of Rosan Bosch Studio appeared first on Architosh.

The Sensible Beginning

ARP ArchitektenPartnerschaft has 80 people working in two locations in Stuttgart. Fifty people are in one office doing all the planning and architecture; thirty are in the second office doing on-site related work. “We have a variety of projects,” says Burkard Illig, an architect and head of the CAD team at the firm. “We do architecture, interiors, urban planning, and landscape architecture. We work across specialties and at different scales. A lot of our projects are multi-family residential projects,” he says. 

The finished building for the BIM Pilot Project was an assisted living for the elderly project for the client Bad Sebastiansweiler GmbH (Mössignen). (Image: Jörg Höflinger / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

In Germany, like in most other countries, the scale of projects can impact BIM adoption as well as who is doing the work. “The big contractors are doing BIM at a very high level on the construction site,” says Illig. “In the public sector, BIM is still a bit dormant.” Without a government mandate for BIM, like in the UK, the German AECO market is slowly moving toward BIM, with architecture firms interested in BIM facing adoption challenges like contractual issues and a lack of BIM competencies. 

ARP has been moving to Big BIM methodically within this German AECO context. In 2015 they began a BIM pilot project. 

The Value in a Pilot Project

Illig, who was in charge of CAD standards for the 80-person firm, began with a pilot project. “At the time I started the pilot project, I was doing some research to understand if doing 3D BIM would be easy enough for the whole office,” he adds. Staff range across three generations with varied software competencies. He began with the help of one other CAD expert in the firm, and they pushed a BIM process on a facility for the elderly. “This pilot project was really about finding out what best practice workflows for BIM look like, so we could later introduce them to the whole office,” he says. 

The firm had been using Vectorworks for approximately 15 years after moving over from ALLPLAN. Before the BIM pilot project, the firm was doing what Illig called 2.5D BIM. “We used all the walls, doors, and windows tools to generate all the information and schedules, but without the 3D benefits,” he says, “and also sections and elevations from the 3D BIM model.” So the firm was moving towards Little BIM in sensible steps. 

The immediate payback in undertaking a full pilot BIM project in Little BIM was apparent to Illig and his CAD team. “You get sections anywhere,” he notes. “Wherever you think you need some clarification about a certain point in the building, you can make a section immediately and see how things look.” In the past, to trouble-shoot building design issues, your option was to keep drawing more sections. “You don’t have to do that anymore; everything is automated.”

One immediate value of full BIM projects is the ability to cut sections through a building at any point to investigate and understand and resolve design challenges. The image above is a more recent production building Big BIM project for the client Bürkert GmbH & Co. KG.  (Image: ARP Stuttgart / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Another immediate benefit of BIM was the ability to quickly render the building from anywhere. “Usually, we hire consultants to create high-end renderings for winning competitions, but we can do our own simple renderings in Vectorworks to benefit the planning process for clarifications with the client.” Illig said that Vectorworks has sufficient rendering abilities but hires specialists to get to that next level of quality needed to win competitions.

This last point reflects how visualization is changing in the architecture industry with the emergence of real-time, interactive rendering solutions like Lumion and Twinmotion. A specialist delivers more compelling still images and more sophisticated animations, using tools that have steep learning curves. On the other hand, architects are flocking to more accessible and faster tools that make up for those aspects by offering “interactive, real-time” environmental dynamics in the visualizations. 

Visualization flexibility is a significant benefit of BIM workflows. Plus, as Illig notes, “the demand is getting higher because clients get more and more used to it; they know we have the building in 3D.” 

next page: Moving to Big BIM

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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 objects. (Image: Stamhuis / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

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?

Applied Modularity and Interchangeability

Ron Rijkers, Team Manager for BIM and Innovation at Stamhuis, began telling me his company’s story by explaining how they went from CAD to BIM with Revit and from Revit to new emerging technologies like VR and Autodesk generative design tools. 

“In retail construction, we start with a 3D laser scan, and we model from that scan,” says Rijkers, who explains his company’s complete delivery process from design to fabrication. Stamhuis will then take the 3D scan of an emptied location and begin the design process. “Everything within these walls will be prefabricated,” he adds. “We have a very large Revit family of elements for our work.” 

Stamhuis both designs and provides components for their client stores. Therefore, they have invested in a high degree of modularity and interchangeability of elements, like store shelving systems, counters, check-out lanes, signage, storage, et cetera. “Our buyers are prefabrication specialists, inventory specialists, so we invest a lot of time making all the elements smart and plug-and-play,” says Rijkers.

Working rapidly with interchangeable modular components certainly saves time in Revit during store planning. However, Rijkers and his team began thinking about how to automate the store planning process. The next step was to look at Dynamo.

Automating Design with Dynamo

Stamhuis decided to invest in programming in Dynamo, all the processes, and decisions a designer had to make in BIM. “We just said we should lock ourselves inside a meeting room for a few days,” he adds. “And what Dieter and others from Autodesk saw is that we have standardized libraries, elements, and design inputs—all of which works very well for generative design.”

An overlay image showing a typical design product of Stamhuis’ custom Dynamo scripted automation process with Autodesk BIM solutions. (Image: Stamhuis / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Making a shift like this takes commitment. Rijkers and his team—which included a liquor store designer and their Dynamo specialist—met with their local Autodesk reseller and their Dynamo expert. “We just pulled all the decision-making processes and tasks the designer had to do in CAD and put them into the right order, like a schedule, and we started programming,” says Rijkers. “In three days, we had a working demo for one project, just by scripting all the tasks the designers do,” he adds. 

Stamhuis had already utilized Dynamo in a limited way with Revit, building a functional tool to handle quoting of materials by combining Excel with Dynamo. But this new computational design model with Dynamo and utilizing Autodesk’s Project Refinery (beta) meant Rijker’s team could reduce hour-long tasks down to minutes. 

“My new focus is to reduce our modeling time by fifty percent,” says Rijkers. He notes that 70 percent of their engineering work consists of modeling, while 30 percent consists of communication, test control, and information management. While Dynamo could eventually create almost all 3D information, he believes that 20 percent of modeling will still be done manually by their designers. 

Streamlining and the Future

Ron Rijkers and his team have been evaluating past store designs by analyzing them with Autodesk Project Refinery and comparing outcomes across various measures. Refinery enables AEC designers of all levels to engage with and optimize their Dynamo designs. It provides a user-interface for the non-scripter/non-programmer. 

03 – Stamhuis has now taken their process to include Autodesk’s Project Refinery, enabling non-scripting professionals to explore design options and analyze designs across specific criteria. (Image: Stamhuis) All rights reserved.

With such a well-honed collection of digital technologies, Stamhuis is well poised to deliver excellence in designing and building projects for its clients. By maximizing the integrations of different disciplines—something they did as part of their Open Next Week concept—they can continue to reduce costs and time for their clients.

04 – Another image of Autodesk’s Project Refinery, enabling non-scripting professionals to explore design options and analyze designs across specific criteria. This image is similar to images Architosh published several years ago about Autodesk’s secretive Project Fractal. Refinery is based on that earlier technology. (Image Stamhuis) All rights reserved.

We don’t need to convince them, because every year we try to build better, faster, and cheaper,” says Rijkers. “And when we innovate our supply chain, we can lower our prices—sharing the benefits of innovation while increasing profits for ourselves.”

Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: Itten+Brechbühl / Architosh. All rights reserved.)  Not credited images are copyrighted to Architosh.

Title Credit:  ( Image: Stamhuis / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

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It helps that Idle Architecture from the beginning has been focused on what firm director, Chris Idle simply refers to as “quality.” The nature of their work, simply put, has tuned the architecture studio’s workflows to delivering very precise documentation under fluid and demanding project deadlines. Their flat organization structure helps them be agile and flexible with staff often covering assignments across multiple projects at once. It keeps things moving.

However, equally important in their ability to tackle ever-larger buildings is their evolution as a BIM-based practice, recently moving from what Chris Idle calls Little BIM to Big BIM. It has led to an eight-story, mid-rise, mixed-use structure in an interesting urban area in Melbourne.

The Sackville Street project proved to be both a good test case for adopting BIG BIM with Vectorworks Architect and a rich learning opportunity for all project stakeholders where BIM in Australia is still gaining key footholds. (Image: Idle Architecture Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Known as the Sackville Street project, the larger commercial structure will be built with high-quality materials and details and the entire project is being handled in a Big BIM process. The jump from Little BIM to Big BIM isn’t without new challenges but it is helping the firm focus on delivery and quality.

Quality as a Differentiator

A quick glance at Idle Architecture Studio’s website or Instagram will inspire; interesting contemporary design responses to various building sites demonstrate this firm’s diversity of expertise as well as its high degree of detail and inventive playfulness. Balanced between taut, urban mixed-use residential structures with sidewalk-facing retail ground floors are svelte, dynamic beachside homes. An interplay of common industrial-inspired materials—large glass walls, black frames, metal skin facades, and roofs—reveal the firm’s particular interests and contexts. The work feels urban, chic, responsive, and precise. It also feels tactile at multiple scales, inviting your eye to imagine running your hands over various textures, both large and small.

A beautiful monolithic trough sink skirts the left side of a gym locker and changing rooms in the Sackville Street project. Such custom interior detailing is common for Ilde Architecture Studio where a focus on refinement in architectural and interior design is standard for all projects. (Image: Idle Architecture Studio / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Such design complexity and sophistication requires rigor. For Chris Idle and his firm he says, “it’s about design and quality. Our buildings can’t really have any rough edges, we need to resolve things fully, and it’s about our focus on how well we put things together.” While residential design firms may often be accustomed to thinner documentation, that is never the case at Idle Architecture. “Traditionally in residential architecture, you can work a lot of stuff out on-site,” says Idle, “but not with the kind of work we are doing. Our work requires a lot of coordination, a lot of thinking.”

The degree of precision is obvious when one takes a deeper look at their portfolio of projects and their very detailed drawings. This experience with precision in design enabled Idle Architecture to be well-suited for delivering their Tribe Hotel project in Perth, Australia. The hotel involved an innovative, design-forward modular unit for rapid assembly on a traditionally constructed podium. Shrouds, facade screens, and a dramatic black finish diminish any sense about the hotel’s prefabrication modular origins.

next page: Little BIM to Big BIM

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On the Awards

Autodesk’s ‘Innovator of the Year’ award is an international award recognizing an individual that is leading, changing, and transforming the design and/or construction process in a positive way. It is a specialized award given out as part of the Autodesk AEC Excellence Awards, with the award ceremony happening concurrently with Autodesk University.

Amr’s award was merited for his use of BIM, often meshed for the first time with drone mapping, laser scanning, virtual reality, mixed reality and other 3D technologies to solve some challenging problems in his company’s delivery of projects. He won out over 41 other global finalists.

Amr Raafat, Vice President VDC and Technology, Windover Construction, winner of the 2019 Autodesk of the Year award, part of Autodesk AEC Excellence Awards. (image: Autodesk / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The AEC Excellent awards are described in detail on Architosh’s coverage. Windover Construction won for its groundbreaking combination of modular construction techniques and VDC (virtual design and construction) applications on CANVAS, an upscale, mixed-use, transit-oriented apartment community covering over 153,000 SF in Beverley, Massachusetts, a Boston-Metro community.

VDC at Windover Construction

Amr’s work at Windover entails pushing the envelope of what is possible in VDC workflows. Starting with the company a little over three years ago, Windover Construction hired him to lead a new position, VP of VDC and Technology. “At Windover what makes us a very different kind of construction company is the embracing of technology,” says Amr, who notes that the creation of his position is a sign of the company’s commitment to embracing and excelling at putting leading-edge technologies to work.

Amr Raafat, Vice President VDC and Technology and the company he work for, Windover Construction, were winners at last year’s Autodesk AEC Excellence Awards, from Autodesk University. (image: Windover Construction / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Amr graduated with a Masters of Architecture from The Boston Architectural College and in his early career worked with world-renowned aquarium architect Peter Chermayeff on the programming, design, and BIM management of multiple international projects. Like more and more tech-forward construction companies, his leadership role in VDC (virtual design and construction) and technologies seems best served by those with architectural educations and backgrounds. His training in architecture school provides him years of working in advanced BIM and 3D software while that same training makes him the perfect liaison for a construction company to understand the needs, goals, and perspectives of the architects designing the buildings Windover Construction builds.

He characterized the VDC role between architecture and construction by saying that in the former the focus is on how to use VDC to “deliver drawings and models that focus on design intent in an efficient and accurate way” while communicating conceptual ideas to the client and all project stakeholders. From the architect’s side, VDC done well is “a very efficient pathway to design that would bring people together.”

On the construction side of VDC, he says, “my goal is to make sure I preserve the design intent,” saying the goal is to build to the building true to the architect’s vision while “eliminating or mitigating risks, increasing project safety, saving materials, staying on schedule and on budget.”

It is interesting to hear from a trained architect now working in construction what the VDC process looks like—the architect’s side is about “communicating” that design intent while from the builder’s side it is about “preserving it” and delivering in actuality.

Amr notes that the preservation of design intent—which is so highly valued by architects—is fundamentally about coordination. “We fully coordinate the building elements and MEPs to fit within the original design geometries; through BIM we are not only meeting design expectations, but we are also accelerating building performance.”

Design, Build and VDC

Windover Construction is a mid-sized AEC company that both serves as a general contractor and in many cases delivers projects using a “design-build” process. This skillset means the company is naturally more adept at delivering BIM models into the project delivery process. Amr also delivers advanced renderings using Autodesk 3ds Max.

Amr Raafat on stage at Autodesk University 2019, talking about Windover and VDC technologies and their role on the CANVAS project, also an award winner at AU. (image: Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Working with architects they tend to integrate BIM models into the process at many different levels. “Sometimes we build them ourselves,” says Amr, “if the architect has only delivered 2D drawings.” Other times, “if we are heavily in the process we work side-by-side with the architect supporting the architect with BIM.”

“Because we are in New England and a large number of heritage structures are here, we sometimes laser scan the existing buildings and hand the architect a model from that data,” he adds. “What I have noticed,” he adds, “in the last few years we are doing more collaborating with the architect—it is not the architect working in a final BIM model and the contractor waiting for that model, we work collaboratively,” he says. Increasingly, Windover is delivering more laser scans to the design and engineering sides of the project delivery team.

CANVAS Modular Project

On the CANVAS project, the first two stories were erected traditionally with a steel frame, while the stories on top of the podium level were build using a modular unit construction by a company in Canada, RCM Modulaire.

An image of the CANVAS project which utilized modular construction on top of a conventionally constructed podium two-level structure with retail at the ground level. (image: Windover Construction / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

One of the fundamental challenges was coordinating the plumbing chases and aligning plumbing elements between “site-built” work and “off-site built” modular work. Amr, who is an FAA-certified drone pilot, flew the drone over the steel multiple times during site erection, using ground survey points to obtain a very high degree of accuracy. He then used ground-level laser scanning to capture 3D data that the drone may have missed.

This image from AU shows a color-coded image of the modular versus steel structure built conventionally for the CANVAS project. (image: Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Using Autodesk Construction Solutions Amr merged the separate point cloud data and then modeled both in Revit along with the plumbing on both the podium floors (2x) and the modular floors. The third-floor openings in the modular boxes were critical that they lined up. He used Autodesk Navisworks to review clash detections and Revit to coordinate all components. Using this approach Windover Construction was able to precisely align factory-built modular work and the chases therein with as-built steel framing chases.

As the scans were generated via drone and laser, Amr says, “we were able to coordinate all this data in real-time in coordination meetings with the factory. When the boxes arrived on-site,” he adds, “all the vertical chases aligned perfectly.” Amr also used the laser scanner for managing critical facade construction issues as well. But the other big notable digital innovation process implemented on the CANVAS project was the use of the Microsoft Hololens onsite.

By feeding Revit BIM models into the Microsoft Hololens AR device, Amr was able to conduct site walk-throughs, overlaying the third-floor modules above the existing second floor structural steel as a hologram. This gave the team an unprecedented visual representation of how building elements between floors came together, all within an immersive experience.

Safety and VR

While the Microsoft Hololens has been a critical piece of the Windover VDC story, the company also uses Oculus Rifts to enhance safety for the company’s employees. “We developed our in-house VR safety training using Autodesk Construction Solutions,” says Amr, “employees step into virtual environments of familiar job sites with Oculus Rifts, look and identify dozens of OSHA violations we have staged in the VR.”

Amr tapped the expertise of the company’s most senior field and safety experts to compile a list of violations, like the missing protection railing shown in the image below. (see image below) The virtual reality training enables their staff to test their OSHA safety knowledge and the company found that the VR training was quite effective compared to conventional safety training methods. “It provides a more memorable and impactful experience,” he adds.

Closing Thoughts: Future Construction

The award-winning CANVAS project furthers Windover’s expertise in modular construction. Asking him if these processes will become standard practice for his company he demurred and says, “every project has its own unique challenges. I study every project and look for the technologies available to best solve them.” These days the Windover Construction toolkit consists of numerous Autodesk software, including Autodesk Revit for their BIM modeling, Autodesk Navisworks for coordination of models, plus other Autodesk Construction Solutions, including a favorite of many of the company’s superintendents in the field: PlanGrid, an Autodesk subsidiary which works with Autodesk Construction Cloud.

Amr Raafat is using drones and VR (virtual reality) to improve safety at Windover Construction sites. Employees test their knowledge of OSHA safety violations stated in virtual construction projects. Using VR software staff can inhabit and walk around a virtual construction site and this leaves a more memorable experience of their learning. (image: Windover Construction / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

When speaking about a Common Data Environment (CDE) tool, Amr noted that while PlanGrid is highly used the company also uses Procore. For their laser scanning the company users Faro scanners. “They are some of the most accurate in the industry and can handle the cold New England weather,” he says, “I’ve worked with them in minus 10-degree weather.”

I asked if Windover is looking further downfield and thinking about doing the modular construction building itself. Amr says, “Windover is one of the very best construction companies that can manage the process of integrating modular construction. We have the in-house expertise in project managers and supers who have the experience to make modular work.”

And thanks to the company’s intensive and committed investment in leading-edge technologies like VDC, BIM, drones, laser scanners, and augmented reality with Hololens, this construction company is extremely well-positioned to deliver on both traditional, hybrid and modular construction projects. “With these technologies that we have experimented with,” he adds, “what we have learned is that designers can be much more flexible with their designs. Modular doesn’t have to be a shoebox.”

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Title image credit: Windover Construction / Architosh. All rights reserved.

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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.

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The small firm has developed important learning lessons for landscape architects working on BIM projects led by architects and developers. Founded in 2001 by Matthias Funk, Hiltrud M. Lintel, and Prof. Rainer Sachse, the scape office has just over 20 talented employees who focus the firm’s work on a mixture of project types. “Eighty percent of our projects are urban spaces and parks, and 20 percent are what we call building-related projects, where we are developing landscapes around new buildings,” says Matthias Funk, principal at scape.

The Viega Project—BIM Lessons

In that latter category, one recent project was for a new headquarters and seminar building in Attendorn. Developed for The Viega Group, an internationally active business in the field of mechanical and plumbing technology for sanitary and heating systems, the seminar building itself had an architectural program component devoted to educating customers about the BIM process in the plumbing and HVAC segments of building technology and design. This building was going to literally be about BIM. And it was also going to be designed and built using a full BIM process.

The Crisis of Closed BIM

When the project began, Matthias explains that the mandate was that the project would proceed as a “Closed BIM” project process. Having been a firm that has done many highly technical projects, scape was selected as the landscape architecture firm. But it would soon be apparent that the BIM process imagined for the project would need to change.

An overview of the project showing site and architecture together in a comprehensive site plan. (image: scape / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

It became evident that scape was the best to help on this project. “It worked out well because we had a very good BIM manager on the project team, who was skilled at implementing a BIM Development Plan,” says Matthias.

They spent some time trying to set up a workflow for landscape architecture in Revit, but they couldn’t get it to match their firm’s workflow and requirements.

“The team had spent nearly half a year developing a Closed BIM process, but in the end, it was easier to do an Open BIM process,” says Matthias, who explained that they had to work in Revit and the other mandated tools formulated in the Closed BIM model. “The term Closed BIM in Germany means that all the subcontractors and consultants need to use a specific tool—you cannot just say I like this tool or that tool,” he adds.

scape developed an Open BIM workflow for the entire project. Here is their workflow with Vectorworks Landmark. (image: scape / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

In the end, a closed BIM workflow wasn’t going to work on this project. Instead, they switched to an Open BIM workflow built around IFC.

The Advantages of Open BIM

As mentioned earlier, Matthias said it was just as easy to develop an Open BIM Development Plan in the end. Not only was it easier for the landscape architects to work more optimally in an Open BIM workflow, but it was also easier for the civil engineering firm and others as well.

“Revit is just not specialized enough for the needs of landscape design,” said Matthias. “Our staff discovered that Revit had many ‘workarounds’ to handle things that we just don’t have in Vectorworks Landmark. For example, you had to use Slabs for Streets.”

Vectorworks Landmark shown here from the Viega Project by scape. Vectorworks Landmark excels at handling complex 3D data and the project contained complex height data across the landscape architect’s work. (image: scape / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Vectorworks Landmark is purpose-built for the needs of landscape architects. Trying to get their staff to work out their firm’s particular workflows in another piece of “mandated software” turned out more challenging than he first thought. “Our staff has over 15 years with Vectorworks,” says Matthias, and you just can’t underestimate the experience they have in this environment.”

Collaboration and Open BIM

Once an Open BIM process was defined for the Viega project things moved along well. “We all made data exchanges through IFC as required by the project,” said Matthias. To help collaboration along, the project participants also used think project!, a cloud-based common data environment that can be used for BIM coordination and management and DESITE MD, an IFC viewer, model checker and information manager.

“We would put our IFC models back out on think project! on the web and then the BIM manager made collaboration models from these IFC models in DESITE MD,” added Matthias.

DESITE MD is software from Germany that handles BIM management, including BIM information, quality and project management. scape created their digital terrain models in Vectorworks using its native tools specifically designed for landform creation, streets, parking lots, curbs, planting designs and complete with height data to coordinate with final project site installation requirements. This 3D model as then translated to IFC to integration into the federated BIM model for the project coordination.

scape also developed custom algorithmic design scripts for their work during the project to further automate complex and time-consuming processes. Vectorworks Landmark includes Marionette, its own built-in visual, node-based algorithmic scripting tool for algorithmic and computational design and modeling. (image: scape / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Taking their site model out through IFC means that the true Digital Terrain Model (DTM) gets translated into a triangulated mesh model. “We don’t have any problems if we interact in this type of environment,” adds Matthias. “Our workflow is setup so that we bring in IFC models from other professionals, and we can load them through IFC into Vectorworks, so they can interact with our true DTM.” This allowed them as landscape architects to make needed adjustments, perform powerful calculations for landform design that are purpose-built features in Vectorworks Landmark, and then reshare their work back through IFC.

next page: BIM for Landscape—Germany Lessons

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Assael Architecture

Assael Architecture, a 100-plus person architecture practice in London with both integrated landscape, interiors, and visualization teams, is a longtime Vectorworks user. The practice tackles complex, mixed-use, and residential-led urban projects, often with demanding density challenges. “The directors were actually using the software when they started the firm,” said Simon Pitt, Director, Assael. “The firm has been using Vectorworks since the day it was called MiniCAD.” Pitt described the firm’s evolution from the pre-BIM days to their BIM transformation as very reasonable and fluid for much of their senior staff who, without knowing it, we’re already working with 3D BIM elements when the firm made the push to develop BIM level 2 competence. New hires and recent grads are sent out for three days of Vectorworks training, then immediately immersed in active projects. “One of the things I love about Vectorworks is it is just very user-friendly and intuitive to use,” adds Pitt.

London-based, Assael Architecture specializes in several building types, but residential urban infill development is chief among them. The firm has a staff of 100. (image: Assael Architecture / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Assael began its transition to BIM in 2013 and slowly developed its BIM processes and workflows. “It took teams 2-3 years to fully make the transition,” says Pitt. “Some teams were a bit faster or slower than others, but it makes a real difference to have a BIM or Vectorworks champion inside of each team,” he adds. The firm itself only has one BIM manager in Ben Lam, an associate with the firm. Pitt, as a director, oversees technologies and research as part of his other leadership roles.

As their BIM competencies grew, the firm became well positioned for one of its signature projects: Pontoon Dock. The challenging urban residential-use project consists of 154 private rented apartments and 82 affordable homes. It also needed to navigate site complexities dealing with a viaduct outside Pontoon Dock DLR Station and the Thames Barrier Park. Moreover, to top it all off, it needed to be executed to the BIM level 2 standard.

Image of BIM model shows some of the urban infill complexity of the Pontoon Dock project. (image: Assael Architecture / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Lam says a vital part of the success at Pontoon Dock was the BIM Execution Plan (BEP), which gained input from multiple sources, including UK government BIM guidelines. “As you know, in the UK, it was mandated that BIM level 2 be in effect by April 2016,” said Pitt, “but that was only for publicly funded projects from the government. However, we found a lot of private clients at that time would wish that their projects would be BIM level 2.”

The firm’s current BEP approach is modeled on a series of successful BIM projects. For Pontoon Dock an Open BIM workflow was baked into the BIM Execution Plan, with a standard set of exchanges happening on a particular time frame. “Our consultants were mostly using Revit, but our BIM Execution Plan promoted Open BIM,” said Lam, “and we would exchange software files as IFC. Assael did real trial runs on actual project files to flesh out the exchange process. “It took a bit of extra time and testing,” he added, “but that way we could make sure that everything was working the way we wanted it to.”

Pontoon Dock was implemented using BIM Level 2 standard using Vectorworks Architect. (image: Assael Architecture / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

During Pontoon Dock, they used Solibri for federating models from various offices and running clash detection, coordination, and model assurance. Assael also utilized BIMcollab for inter-team collaboration on the BIM models; Solibri’s image snapshots with markups were sent up to BIMcollab in the cloud as a CDE tool. “So if a mechanical engineer sees a clash somewhere, he will generally create a report in Solibri which consists of an image of the clash and a few notes,” adds Pitt. “Then that gets loaded into BIMcollab, and from there it goes to certain parties who are responsible for wherever a clash happens. So it would be instantaneous when that happens.”

Itten+Brechbühl AG

Itten+Brechbühl is one of the largest architecture firms in Europe, with over 320 staff, based in Switzerland. It also arguably belongs to the offices with the most in-depth competencies in BIM inside of Switzerland. Also, like Assael, the Swiss firm has been using Vectorworks for a very long time.

The firm has expertise across a wide variety of build types, many of them technical like healthcare architecture. A giant within a small country, Itten+Brechbühl has well-established Big BIM competencies based on a high involvement in BIM standards within the region and applying these standards to their projects—with Vectorworks.

Scott Headquarters is a sophisticated recently completed BIM project that relied on Open BIM processes with the ISO 16739 standard. (image: Itten+Brechbühl / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“For the Swiss speaking part of our offices the main CAD system is Vectorworks for creating plan products or IFC models,” said Marc Pancera, an associate and the firm’s head of BIM Research & Development. Pancera notes that a range of software tools are operational within the firm, and it varies concerning staff preferences and what languages are spoken in various offices. For early-stage design, Pancera says that people often use what they like on projects. “It could be people are using a bit of Rhino and Grasshopper or a bit of SketchUp or perhaps even Vectorworks as a drawing or sketching tool,” he adds. “But as soon as we need to produce BIM models and technical plans, Vectorworks is there for us.”

Like Assael, Itten+Brechbühl has committed to Open BIM processes and has developed deep competencies in Open BIM workflows. “Everything we do we try to do using open standards like IFC, BCF, or MVD…so actually what is called Open BIM. All our projects shall have a BIM-ready setup no matter if BIM is asked for or not. Except for small residential or renovation projects, which may be BIM-based, but require project-specific clarification of objectives and use cases. As early adopters of BIM, we have a little bit of an advantage, but it is one thing that you are ahead, but it also means you had to figure out all the new ways of working mostly by yourself,” said Pancera.

The Scott Headquarters building’s BIM model image shown here. The project consisted of a very complex facade system. (image: Itten+Brechbühl / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Open BIM too may involve a continuous stream of new ways of working. The “open” part means teams use a wide variety of software tools and interoperate with each other using Open BIM technologies. While some architects may feel that using the same tool as their consultant will make the collaboration process easier, they will probably find that they need to adapt their processes for each project again and again and therefore compromise the quality of standard for their own delivery. Using the IFC data model as a baseline for information requirements benefits companies, clients, and authorities equally. Such firms like Itten+Brechbühl and Assael develop more agility committing to Open BIM because they face more ongoing variation in tools and workflow scenarios.

Those architects who haven’t yet made the jump to BIM fear the drop in productivity as they move away from either an old tool or an old process—or both! However, they fail to see the process as an opportunity to build competencies in BIM or even new business models. Figuring out the process changes to move to BIM develops firm-based competencies that add ongoing value to AEC discipline businesses. “We try to be involved in national or regulatory BIM committees so we can contribute to standards and see where it will go with our firm,” said Pancera.

A recent project by Itten+Brechbühl demonstrates the broad BIM competencies of the firm. The Scotts Sports Headquarters project was fully realized in Vectorworks Architect and involved a complex facade system. Both the design and the production documents were implemented by the firm, with a complete Open BIM IFC-based BIM process for working with consultant engineers. Significant projects at the firm can consist of teams larger than 40 people or more, including all consultants. Unlike Assael Architecture, Pancera said that CDE platforms are yet not used as often as he would wish because the collaboration platforms in Switzerland do not cover the actual needs for model-based collaboration. BCF-management can very well be achieved by tools like BIMcollab, but there are many other issues of data management, reprographics services, field deficiency management, et cetera, which currently have to be handled with different platforms. Pancera notes this is less optimal and says, “for a real and open collaboration environment we can learn a lot from Scandinavia, in this case to Dalux or Bimsync.

An interior view of the Scott Headquarters building project. (image: Itten+Brechbühl / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Vectorworks Architect is fully capable of managing large-scale BIM projects through its multi-user environment, Project Sharing, wherein a master or Project File is created from which Working Files can be pulled to edit and add information and then get synchronized back to the project file. Itten+Brechbühl also still uses referencing technology and has maintained and continually developed a firm-wide file naming convention that tightly organizes project files so that data is well managed. For their firm, Marionette technology is yet less used for sophisticated geometry generation but more used for data. “We have done a little plugin,” adds Pancera, “which reads the space program from an Excel spreadsheet and directly creates spaces with the correct size in Vectorworks, including all necessary data fields such as planned area, occupancy, name, etc., from the spreadsheet. That may be a little nerdy, but I like that kind of stuff.”

Visualization and Looking Towards the Future

Pancera said that while Renderworks is essential as a component of the firm’s tools, Itten+Brechbühl farms out rendering needs during competitions. “We do those externally because we are generally not fast enough as people who do that kind of work full time,” he says. For internal work, the firm explores VR using IrisVR’s Prospect or The Wild. “We use a variety of visualization types,” he adds, “like data visualizations or gypsum (white) renderings using Vectorworks’ Renderworks technology.”

Assael Architecture, on the other hand, has built up its own visualization department. Simon Pitt says the team uses Autodesk 3ds max mostly. “Basically, the work they do comes from Vectorworks [BIM] models,” he notes. Vectorworks can export directly into that 3ds file format. “Vectorworks Renderworks is still very important to us,” adds Pitt. “Elevation views are flat-on Renderworks views of the model, with textures and shadows.”

Pancera was pleased to see the new Lumion addition to Vectorworks 2019. “We are also hoping for Enscape or Twinmotion,” he added. “Those are the three tools that are very impressive and easy to handle. With those tools, we can do the work ourselves and give them to the client as an experience of being in the model,” he said. Pancera sees that while IrisVR is an excellent tool for “intra-team” design evolution work, what they really want is to take IFC models directly into Virtual Reality for collaboration.

It is clear from talking to BIM leaders like Assael and Itten+Brechbühl that their competencies in BIM are at the edge where they are pushing on and extending BIM deeper into other processes and phases of the work; this is now common among all the BIM authoring platform leaders, of which Vectorworks is one. The desire to extend BIM and BIM models to discreet tools and workflows is a precise index of a mature BIM leader. Simon Pitt says that an area where his clients have asked them to go is towards FM (facilities management). “Because we do a lot of build-for-rent projects, our clients are very interested in CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) software programs.”

Closing Thoughts

While Vectorworks may consistently be associated with design-led firms, including “starchitects” who are famous for remarkable drawings and visuals, the US-based BIM leader offers large and enterprise architecture firms a robust and capable platform for BIG BIM that defies the common assumptions.

Marc Pancera summed up the irony well. “Some people may think of Vectorworks Architect as this Adobe Illustrator-like CAD tool, but whenever we need to look at something in architecture, we have a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional element. It could be axonometric, perspectival or more sophisticated—in the end, you need to explain something, you need to take out the complexity of the whole, so you can focus on a scheme, a concept, an element—the architect’s goal is always to reduce complexity and focus on what is important.” Pancera says having those graphics legacies and somewhat legendary tools married to modern BIM features helps Itten+Brechbühl do precisely that.

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Design Excellence over Technology

The Vectorworks Design Scholarship evaluates candidates’ work across a balanced judging rubric, looking at aspects of design quality, concept, originality, presentation, and—of course—effective use of digital technologies.

Competing for prizes and cash worth $10,000 USD, this international design scholarship draws entrants from around the globe, with particularly strong submissions from Europe and the United States. Students typically enter a myriad of projects, including thesis, capstone, or group projects. It’s also strongly encouraged to enter multiple projects to increase your chances of winning the desirable prize money and exposure.

Open Pocket

Ningxin Cheng and Kalen McNamara were in different years in their architecture degrees at Rice University, in the United States, when they submitted their group project titled Open Pocket. It is the most recently awarded Richard Diehl Award winner—the top international prize worth $7,000 USD to be applied to future educational endeavors. This was in addition to the $3,000 USD they both won from the US award.

Open Pocket. An image of a research area that is called an open pocket in the parlance of the design thinking of this award-winning student project. (image: Ningxin Cheng & Kalen McNamara / Architosh. All rights  reserved.)

Cheng and McNamara designed Open Pocket as part of a Totalization studio at Rice, an advanced studio track that emphasizes the nature of the architect as the vital orchestrator at the center of diverse teams. Designing a three-story, multi-use building on Johnson Space Center campus, the students benefitted from having NASA as a conceptual client and visiting NASA teams. That interaction was pivotal.

“Space flight is a pretty incredible human activity,” says Kalen McNamara, “but its also an amazing endeavor that has a poetic quality.” The duo wanted their project to reflect the fact that JSC doesn’t just generate inventions but also pursues discovery. This seems reflected on multiple levels in their design, a building that houses public amenity spaces on the first floor like a cafe and gallery, while serving NASA researchers and visiting scientists with workspaces and guest accommodations on the second and third floor, respectively. The project name comes from the notion of a terminal space that is any space that is separated from the main open plan. “There is a difference in what we call a pocket from a conventional terminal room,” says Ningxin Cheng, “because a conventional terminal room is typically off a corridor, and you enter from there; we are trying to get the sense of a terminal room but have them feel very connected to the main public space.”

Formally, Open Pocket presents itself to the observer as a series of curved and flat, metal-clad surfaces, some suspended over the ground, with variable visible permeability. The essence of the floor plan is indeterminate from viewing the structure from the outside, generating intrigue about its inner workings. Its facade material further reflects this, a mixture of composite materials consisting of semi-translucent, perforated, and reflective plastic panels with fritted and non-fritted glass. Speaking about the variable visual penetrability, Cheng says, “we are using a double facade, and the optical effect of that double facade is useful. So when you are on the ground floor, the upper level, which houses residential uses, is less visible because of the way the two systems overlap.”

The floor plan of Open Pocket offers both open and semi-private areas for building users and visitors alike. (image: Ningxin Cheng & Kalen McNamara / Architosh. All rights  reserved.)

Other aspects are driving at the building’s overall form, including the overall JSC campus site and navigation through that campus. “We see that different user groups have different access points. And that means that they have different starting points and different sequences for experiencing the building, and that means the overall form of the building is decided upon based on these differences between different groups.”

View of a physical model of the project.

View of rendered elevation.

Cheng and McNamara primarily developed their project in Rhino, developing a complete 3D model but not a BIM model. “We actually did not use Vectorworks on this project,” says McNamara. “It would have been really useful if we had it, especially because of its BIM capabilities, because we had to develop our project to a higher level of technical detail as required of the Totalization studio. But we entered this competition and won, and now future students at Rice will have this tool.”

All winners of the Vectorworks Design Scholarship gain both cash awards for future studies, academic travel, or other educational purposes that they desire. In addition, their colleges get free Vectorworks software for their labs and free training.

The Other Place

Alexander Drachenberg submitted his final year project and won the Architecture scholarship prize in 2017. He finished his degree in architecture from Bergische Universität Wuppertal, in Germany. His project was a compelling urban intervention operating at multiple levels as both city infrastructure for crossing a large canal as well as a multi-use large building structure for public and private functions.

The Other Place is primarily a museum project that spans a canal in Hamburg, Germany, in an old industrialized zone the city wishes to revitalize over time. Clad in metal panels and offering the observer a futuristic and sleek city landmark, The Other Place building is essentially four to five floors that operate as bands that twist inside the structure itself. “Most of the time the structure is four to five floors,” says Alex, who notes that as you move across areas of the building, you rise up or down twice. “So if we start at zero, at 90 degrees you are up 10 meters, at 180 degrees you are up 20 meters,” he adds. “And then you go up and down again” on the final 180 degrees. “So you are always experiencing the interior and exterior from different levels as you walk through the loop.”

The Other Place. A very compelling image of the winning museum project as it spans a canal. (image: Alexander Drachenberg / Architosh. All rights reserved).

This new museum in Hamburg project includes public amenity uses like cafes and restaurants that, like the public loop that takes city occupants from one side of the canal to the other, operate entirely independently from the museum itself. Alex says these types of uses are critical to activating the area, which is approximately equal on both sides of the canal. “The main problem right now is the area is split by the canal in the middle,” adds Alex. “It is nearly two equal parts on east and west, and that is why the museum in the middle can function as circulation but also at the same time as a place where people want to spend time.”

Much like Open Pocket, the museum building’s plan is curvilinear in nature; it also offers a dynamic tension between its curved inner walls, slow lifting or falling floors, and disappearance and reappearance of the key reference point—the canal. Alex explains that the structure is designed a lot like a concrete bridge, with its structural box below and concrete deck above. This time that deck is not entirely flat, and its structural box is a void filled with program elements. In this case, primarily, it is a museum with inner spaces that reflect different genres of museum architecture. This was purposeful, aimed at eliminating the standard, white cube-like museum exhibition space. “If you went back 100 years ago, museums were designed internally for the artifact,” he says. “that has been lost in today’s museum design that is designed for flexibility.” By combining older schema for museum designs, and various ones, his new museum can house artifacts that are more suited for particular spaces.

The Other Place. The museum building is essentially a bridge structure and spans nearly 100m over the canal. (image: Alexander Drachenberg / Architosh. All rights reserved)

Visualizing this museum is not easy, especially internally. Alex developed the intricate 3D model for this project using Rhino and Grasshopper. He then took model views and placed them in Vectorworks. “Detail drawings and sections coming from the 3D model were pretty rough,” adds Alex, “so at times I just drew the rest in Vectorworks because it was easier than modeling everything.” Today’s architecture students are often highly facile from moving from program to program. “Vectorworks is pretty popular in Germany, especially in University,” says Alex. “I learned about it from a friend who was using it at work. It has this huge library, and you don’t always have to move from Vectorworks to Photoshop; actually, you can do a lot of stuff like that directly in Vectorworks, which is much different than other programs. It combines a lot of tools in one.”

An interior gallery space inside this museum, recalls the unique spaces of the Pantheon in Rome.

The dynamic floor plan with rising and falling floor levels.

Alex graduated a few years ago after winning this award and soon went to work at UNStudio in Amsterdam. “I was really interested in parametricism, which is why I went to UNStudio,” he says. Now at SOM in Chicago, he is working on large projects where he has direct access to innovative engineering in MEP and structures directly within the same practice. “I am super happy at SOM; we have engineers, mechanical people, structural people and they are sitting right next to each other, in one space, and you learn a lot from them.”

Dormouse — Staying in the Old Barn

Sophia Rodermund’s winning project in the Interior Design category begins with highly emotive watercolor paintings setting and capturing the mood and experience of summertime camp experiences for children. An interior architecture graduate from Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe, University of Applied Sciences, in Germany, Sophia’s artistic approach to her project set her work apart from other entrants. The process of storytelling begins before the first drawings are seen.

Sophia did a storyboard of watercolor paintings to develop the narrative qualities of her award-winning project. (image: Sophia Rodermund / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“I am really interested in painting, that is kind of my hobby,” says Sophia. “The watercolors are of the children; the pictures were actually what I showed at the beginning, so when I started my presentation at the university, I started by showing a little picture book. To start the story of the project, I wanted to start with a very adventurous atmosphere.”

This approach for narrative and atmosphere envelopes Sophia’s entire design entry and is reflected in her richly layered and emotive drawings and renderings.

A rendering of the project was implemented fully in Vectorworks with post-production Adobe Photoshop. (image: Sophia Rodermund / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Set in a pastoral setting, Dormouse — Staying in an Old Barn is a project for children. An old barn is the site location for an interior architecture renovation. Given the option for her master’s thesis of having her professor choose a site or finding a real project site herself, Sophia selected an old semi-abandoned old barn 20 minutes away from where she lives. “I knew this barn from when I was a child,” she added. “It is totally empty; they don’t really use it. I thought it would be a great idea to use it and renovate. And because it is nearby, I could also do measurements of the buildings and draw the floor plans.” The barn is set in a setting with house and attachments and was built in 1913. It was used for storing hay.

The site plan for the renovated barn project consists of a set of buildings in the German countryside.

Another rendering of the renovated barn project that houses a day or overnight camp for children 8-14.

Conceived as a summer camp for children ages 8-14, the project consists of three renovated barn levels that include places for activities, improv theater, classes, sleeping, dining, and guests and bathrooms. “This is like a summer camp space for kids,” adds Sophia. “Children can go there to spend the day at the farm, but I wanted them to have the opportunity to stay longer, like a weekend so that they can sleep in this ‘hay hotel,’ and they can eat there and enjoy life in the countryside,” she says.

The importance of materials for the renovation was vital. The barn was built mostly out of sandstone and brick and also pine wood. “I wanted to stay very basic and natural with the materials,” says Sophia. New materials match up with existing pine wood and the use of clay as well. The “hay hotel” is on the top level, the hayloft level, and consists of open areas that are organized around the structural cadence of the barn structure. The children can stack the hay bales to create large or intimate play spaces.

Sophia’s sectional views and renderings communicate the use of the space and its evocative atmosphere quite well. Streams of light pour through openings and boards in and around the structure. Asked how she produced her winning entry, she said, “first I did a 3D model of the whole building, and for the sections, I used the ‘Section Tool’ in Vectorworks and did a normal section, so you have a line drawing of the building. And everything you see with the colors, textures and those light beams or light rays was done in Photoshop.” For her 3D-rendered views, she used Vectorworks’s built-in rendering engine and did post-processing in Photoshop.

The barn’s third-floor is a “hay hotel” for children who choose overnight camp. (image: Sophia Rodermund / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

“We start in our first or second semester learning Vectorworks,” she noted. “We then learn other programs like Cinema 4D, Rhino, and SketchUp.” “I like that you can do 2D sketches very easily, but I like that you have the opportunity to generate 3D sketches in it as well, and you can switch between the 2D and 3D whenever you want.”

Already experienced in interior architecture from a smaller firm near her university, Sophia is now moving to a larger practice in Dusseldorf. “It’s a big architecture firm, a little less interior design and more architecture for me, but I am very excited. They have a lot of exciting projects,” she says. Asked what she learned from her award-winning thesis project, she adds, “I recognized from my thesis that I am really into existing buildings that have a history and can be adapted,” she says. “I also enjoy working with natural materials. Especially in Germany,” she continues, “we have a lot of existing buildings in smaller towns that are totally empty and not used. I think that is a good opportunity for interior architects to reuse them.”

Lessons — From Scholarship to Practice

The Vectorworks Design Scholarship winners above have all produced fantastic noteworthy work and demonstrated excellent capabilities in both design, design-thinking, and socially locating their skills to the benefit of society. From understanding how to best reflect NASA’s broader mission and importance through architectural expression and plan configuration, to solving complex urban regeneration through innovative cross-use structures, to establishing an awareness of old buildings and their potential revitalization and emotive uses for society. All three winners (four when we count individuals) have demonstrated excellence in design well deserving of further accolades and public recognition.

Allow the Vectorworks Design Scholarship past winners to inspire you to enter your project. The current scholarship concludes later this summer with all submissions due by August 29, 2019. Winners will gain substantial cash to use however they wish, along with free Vectorworks software and training for their college or university.

Hurry and enter here today and before the August 29 deadline!

The post Profile: Design Excellence—The Work of Vectorworks Scholarship Winners appeared first on Architosh.

The difficulty has always fallen into two areas. Firstly, it has taken decades for computerized software applications to mimic the painterly qualities of watercolor and brush, pastels, and the human hand. Second, it was always a struggle to work with a mouse or a remote touch-pad that connected to your computer.

MORE: Architecture Firm Accelerates BIM Process—Using Their Hands

Today those two problems have been truly solved. We have iPad Pros and Surface tablets that enable us to draw and paint directly on their glass canvases, with finger or styli that can mimic the tactile grip of real pens and pencils and fingers. And the software options for painterly drawing on these devices have matured dramatically, offering artists originally trained in the analog world with a drawing and painting experience that often is preferred over the old way of doing things.

Autodesk SketchBook

One such app is Autodesk’s SketchBook. We have written about its use last year in the architecture space. In this article, we go into the colorful world of landscape architecture and dig into how Eric Arneson, of San Francisco-based Antonia Bava Landscape Architects.

01 – A CAD drawing serves as the basis for the process in Arneso’s workflow. This view shows the primary two CAD layers in PDF in Photoshop which will be converted to PNG with transparent backgrounds

Eric Arneson has been using SketchBook with great effect in his professional work in landscape design, producing beautiful digital drawings on a tablet device running. He works with a Microsoft Surface 4 Pro but the same methods he employs in SketchBook Pro could be used on an iPad Pro. The key is he is using his hands to draw digitally.

Now might be a good time to mention that Autodesk SketchBook is for those who love to draw, ideally with color. What you draw is up to you and some impressive artwork is shown on Autodesk’s SketchBook website including a beautiful Delorean (Back to the Future) car.

02 – Working on a Microsoft Surface tablet Arneson fills in colors on the primary layers. Because each element of the design is on its own layers he in SketchBook he can have non-destructive editable control over the whole drawing. (image: Autodesk / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

The app is ideal for architects and designers who need to mix colors, line types, use perspective (as it includes advanced perspective guides), use dynamic gradient fills and work in an advanced layer functionality tool. And the blend modes are powerful for use on bodywork on car design.

Arneson’s Process

Arneson’s process for landscape architecture involves three key steps. Step one is to import a CAD base layer. For his CAD drawing, he uses Autodesk AutoCAD to produce the base-layer. Now conceivably, one may want to start a design drawing before such a hardline CAD drawing is created, but the layers created in CAD are pretty important for setting up the entire structure of the drawing in SketchBook Pro.

Step 1 continued

For best working methods and to emulate Arneson’s process exactly, users should consider acquiring a CAD program. Architosh readers, for the most part, are well-versed in CAD software and what Arneson does is export his CAD layers to PDF in separate layers. So work with a CAD tool that can do exactly that.

03 – From this view it appears that this is common hand-drawn marker-based landscape drawing, but it’s not on paper and thus embodies advantages in editing and workflow that paper can never give you. (image: Autodesk / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

So step one fully includes creating a base CAD layer that he organizes in two key layers: (a) hardscape and (b) plantings. He exports each layer as separate PDF files. He then opens these files in Adobe Photoshop and saves them to PGN format but only after removing the white background. They save with transparent backgrounds—the goal.

Step 2

The next step is about carefully setting up the PGN files into SketchBook with the correct drawing/coloring layers organized beneath them. Arneson has a very good process in both arranging the layers and in naming the layers. (you can see the whole process outlined here).

04 – This whole video shows the entire process sped up, from near beginning to end. 

Next, he creates a reference layer and adds pictures of the plants, grasses, and hardscape materials he is interested in. From these images, he can use SketchBook’s color picker to pick up the colors from the images, of which he saves to a custom color palette for use in the drawing process.

Step 3

The last step involves the most fun work.(see video above) Arneson begins with filling in the key ground plane layers, the grass lawn, and then works on the hardscape next. With layers named for each planting type element (e.g.: trees, shrubs, etc.) he proceeds through the coloring process.

The original PDF CAD data can be used as is or as a trace layer to hand draw over much of that material. Arneson draws over much of it in the video above.

Closing Comments

Arneson notes that good layer management is a key to successful work in SketchBook. The layer management organizes the workflow to a large extent and allows the separation of hand-drawn data such that non-destructive edits to the whole image can be easily executed. This enables the user to experiment as well. The results speak for themselves in looking at Arneson’s final product.

05 – Arneson’s final product is now saved out of Autodesk SketchBook and dropped back into AutoCAD and noted up within a title block drawing setup. (image: Autodesk / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

For those who are interested in hand-drawing in the digital age, and for a more painterly approach on tablets, the complete process Eric Arneson uses with SketchBook is detailed out on an Autodesk blog post here.

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The post The Artistry of Landscape Designer Eric Arneson—Using Autodesk SketchBook appeared first on Architosh.