IES Intelligent Communities Lifecycle (ICL)

The ICL is a relatively new technology platform for developing sustainable communities that was launched by the leading performance analysis solutions vendor, IES, last year. Up until now, IES has been best known for its powerful IESVE suite of solutions focused on the in-depth performance analysis of individual buildings, allowing new buildings as well as retrofits to be designed to consume significantly less energy without sacrificing occupant comfort. With the ICL, short for “Intelligent Communities Lifecycle,” IES has expanded its expertise to larger groups of buildings such as campuses and neighborhoods. The idea is the same—to apply sustainable design concepts—but now to entire communities and not just individual buildings.

This review explores the individual components of the ICL for modeling, monitoring, and analysis, and how they can be integrated into a digital twin into a digital twin for sustainable design.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2020/IES-ICL.html

AEC (Technology) in the Time of Coronavirus

In the wake of the current coronavirus pandemic, it has been difficult to find something meaningful and relevant to write about in the area of AEC technology, the focus area of AECbytes. The best I have been able to come up with is to highlight the impact of the crisis on the AEC industry so far and the response to it from AEC technology. A pandemic like this also behooves us to look into the future and ask how this might change—if at all—the nature of our industry in terms of what gets built, how it will be designed and constructed, and the technology that will be required to support it.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2020/issue_103.html

 

Rhino Inside Revit

I recently attended an event hosted by the San Francisco Computational Design Institute (SFSDI) in which I learnt about a new initiative by McNeel & Associates, developers of Rhino, to bring the power of Rhino and its Grasshopper add-in to Revit. While Revit already integrates with Autodesk’s own Dynamo application for design scripting, the ability to now also be able to use Grasshopper for this has the potential to dramatically improve Revit’s modeling capabilities, given that Grasshopper is the most well-established, sophisticated, and widely-used algorithmic modeling application currently available.

This article explores this new Rhino.Inside Revit add-in works, along with a broader look at the area of design scripting in AEC and an overview of Rhino and Grasshopper.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2020/Rhino-Inside-Revit.html

Infurnia: Cloud-based Architecture and Interior Design

The number of cloud-based applications for the AEC industry has been steadily rising since cloud computing was introduced over a decade ago, but so far, most of these applications have been for tasks such as project management, collaboration, model-checking, issue management, and construction planning—tasks that deal primarily with content that has been already created. Applications that actually allow you to author design content using a web browser are few and far between, and even those that exist are primarily desktop applications that have been extended to work on the web, such as SketchUp and AutoCAD. This is why when I came across Infurnia, I was intrigued, because it was developed from the ground up as a cloud-based design application. There is no desktop version and nothing that needs to be installed for it to work.

So how well does it actually work? Let’s find out.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2020/Infurnia.html

Airport Building Information Modelling: Book Review

The book, Airport Building Information Modelling, is an extended case study of the implementation of BIM on the new Istanbul Airport project, which is now in operation and is currently the world’s largest airport terminal building under a single roof.

Given that the project is relatively recent, the choice to use BIM for it is hardly surprising—after all, why would any venture not want to deploy newer and more advanced technologies that are available rather than use older and outdated technologies? Thus, the book is notable not because it tells us why BIM was used for this project, but how. Also, one of its authors, Ozan Koseoglu, was the Chief Technology Officer of the project and directly responsible for its BIM implementation, making the “how” come comes straight “from the horse’s mouth,” as it were. The co-author of the book, Yusuf Arayici, comes from academia, and his research and writing expertise is reflected in the content of the book, which is well organized and structured, making the level of detail in it easy to digest and far from overwhelming.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2020/AirportBIM-Book.html

AEC Technology: Hits and Misses

The start of a new decade is a good time to take stock of where we are and where we have been.

I have been in the AEC technology industry for over 15 years, in the course of which I have had the opportunity to observe and study its key trends. I have seen applications that have come and gone, as well as applications that have come and stayed. Often, in the course of my current writing when I have needed to go back and research some of my older articles, I come across an application and I wonder: Is it still around, and if so, how is it doing? A lot of applications seemed very relevant and promising when they were launched. Have they stood the test of time?

Based on my own experience and research, this article captures a summary of what I found.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2020/AECTech-HitsMisses.html

People Profile: Kayleigh Houde

Kayleigh Houde, a computational engineer who spearheads the Computational Collective at BuroHappold, shares her experiences and insights on AEC technology in this Profile.

“…there hopefully will come a time (in the not so distant future) where a group of firms or teams develops a suite of code-based toolkits that have the backing of decades of AEC knowledge.”

URL: http://aecbytes.com/profile/2020/PeopleProfile-KayleighHoude.html

BIM for FM at UCSF

 A few months ago, the organization, IFMA (International Facility Management Association) presented a webinar on “Integrating BIM and FM: Status, Case Study and Opportunities” which included a case study of how BIM was integrated with FM on the new UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) Medical Center in Mission Bay. Unlike BIM for design and construction which are, by now, well established and understood in the AEC industry, there are no known strategies for implementing BIM for FM, so the UCSF-Mission Bay team had to start from scratch and figure it out. The effort has taken years, but it is finally ready and in use in the real-life operation and maintenance of the hospital. An overview of how the BIM-FM integration was done, as shared in the webinar, is presented in this article.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2019/BIM4FM-UCSF.html

Autodesk University 2019

This article discusses the main AEC-specific technology updates that were shared at the recent Autodesk University, including:

  • Integration of construction applications into a new Autodesk Connected Cloud
  • Expanded integration of Revit and Civil 3D with ArcGIS online
  • Launch of Project Refinery as a public beta for generative design
  • Integrating Revit with IoT in BIM 360 Ops to create “smart spaces”

It also provides a brief overview of some of the third-party products that were exhibited at the event, including IdeateApps, ElumTools, The Wild, and Newforma.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2019/issue_102.html