AU 2019. 01

I flew in to Tampa, via London & Miami. 24 hours from take off to landing. Still managed a quality weekend with my daughter Wendy. We met up with Alfredo at a great little Colombian restaurant and later on Wendy and Michael tried out the VR experience of Notre Dame via the Enscape3d executable, and the Oculus Rift S. The cathedral is a 19th century neogothic design in the city where the restaurant owners come from. Manizales, look it up on wikipedia like I did.

Five hour direct flight on a budget ticket. Despite some turbulence i was able to do some sketching on my Samsung Note 8 with Sketchbook Pro. It’s basically a trace over, but I’m letting decisions float up from my subconscious about how loose or precise to be in different areas. Ultimately its an opportunity to engage with the form in a different way and see what thoughts drift across my brain in the process. 

Vegas is not my favourite city in the world but it’s an interesting place to see at least once. Like Dubai it has a penchant for taking wonderful historic places and blowing them out of all proportion in the copying process. But it’s a fantasy world so no need to get all pedantic. 

There is a message from Francois saying he has done some work on the “triangular” windows that bring some light into the triforium galleries that overlook the nave. I got an error message and the glass disappeared, so I loaded it again, this time overwriting the parameters with the ones in the family. That fixed it so I was able to refresh the Enscape3d executable in time for my afternoon presentation. It’s so cool that we can access the model over a conference WiFi, make a few changes and synchronise

The night shot from Enscape was an accident really, not sure why it is illuminated like that, but it really looks cool.  Big old buildings are always really atmospheric at night time, spooky perhaps.

Meanwhile Alfredo was adding a small rose window modelled by his friend Marc. That’s up in the transept gable and must bring light into the roof void. Things are moving forward nicely. 

And so to the keynote. Thousands of people sitting in a rock concert atmosphere with big screens and coloured light beams. Several impressive case studies. Airbus factory layouts optimised using algorithms to cycle through thousands of options. High Rise hotel using factory built modular rooms. Probably the stand out for me was Build Change using Revit and Dynamo to speed up the design of retrofitted strengthening of homes in earthquake prone areas. 

Possibly the most amusing was Autodesk and VW teaming up to reinvent the wheel. It’s for the new “electric combi” not sure about the clean ability of those orange spiders webs, but they are supposed to be  strength to weight optimised. Time will tell. 

Before I knew it 4.30 came around and I had to stop obsessing about the first few sentences and just blunder into my presentation. The audience was fantastic. Very few empty seats, and lots of enthusiasm afterwards. But I was tired.

I woke in the early hours of this morning and started organising images for this blog post. I had fallen asleep quite early and missed out on the evening party BIM track had invited me to. Not as young as I used to be. Lying in a hotel bed using PIXLR on my phone to create some atmospheric images of those triangular windows. 

“THE WAY WE BUILD” ROAD TRIP

I’m about to go on vacation. Weekends will be spent with my grandsons, but on weekdays I will be wearing my “The Way We Build” hat. From 26-30 August I will be in London, looking at buildings and meeting people. The following week I will be based in South Yorkshire and from 9-13 Sept, somewhere between Hastings and Basingstoke. I am particularly interested in meeting people involved in Heritage Work and stone masonry.

I want to connect with people who can contribute practical insights into our work, which applies Building Information Modelling to the study of historic architecture. We are an international team of enthusiasts, using digital tools to ask probing questions about structures like Notre Dame de Paris.

How were the zigzag vaults around the ambulatory built? Why do the spiral stairs at the four corners of the Transepts terminate are different levels?   We intend to embed information in the model and to make it accessible online. Input from people with deep knowledge of traditional building crafts will be crucial. 

BIM is all about collaboration: bringing together multi-disciplinary teams and integrating their contributions. We are applying this approach to study how societies have chosen to build, in different times and places. 

Prior to starting Project Notre Dame, we spent 4 years piecing together a Revit model of the Bank of England, as it was when John Soane retired almost 200 years ago. 


I’ve always been a visual thinker. From as young as I can remember, drawing was my favourite way of analysing the world. I still use hand sketching as a way to gain fresh insights.  The fluid and intuitive nature of this hand-eye-brain process makes it a wonderful complement to the more constrained and systematic work of building a BIM model.

                               

I love using the power of my “BIM pencil” to think about buildings. It forces you to think about function, structure and sequence in a way that simple mesh modelling (digital cardboard) fails to do. This is what we are doing on Project Notre Dame: taking lessons learned on Project Soane & using BIM to explore the “Way We Build”.

                  

The term BIM is a catch-all label for digital tools and processes that facilitate collaborative thinking about buildings.  BIM uses data-rich models, to integrate contributions from multiple participants in a central location, where conflicts and queries can be discussed and resolved. We can create arresting visuals & VR experiences from the same data set we use to generate measured drawings, spreadsheets and analytics.

BIM is normally confined to commercial building contracts, but we believe that it has enormous potential for collaborative studies.  Almost everyone is fascinated by the way different human civilisations around the world have built towns and cities over the centuries. Increasingly people are applying BIM tools and processes to heritage work, archeology, art history, interpretative studies aimed at the general public.

BIM models have the potential to integrate contributions from a wide range of participants interested in understanding how buildings work, why they were built that way, what meaning they can convey to us today. This is the approach we aim to pioneer, drawing on the knowledge and experience of people across the world with a diverse range of skills and interests.

Our team of enthusiasts is spread across 4 continents, connected by cloud technologies. We learn by doing, by debating, by studying history. Mostly we are BIM addicts, but why not expand the circle?

If you have a different perspective to offer please contact me here on my blog, or through LinkedIn. Maybe we can meet in the UK and talk about buildings. What could be better? 

Kudos to Paul, Alfredo, Daniel, Marcel, Francois, Russell, Eugene and everyone else who has contributed work, images, ideas that are reflected in this post.

LATENT DEFECTS

OK, this is a first for me.

I've never used Revit Server, nor has anyone in our office ... until now.  We suddenly find ourselves needing to do some work jointly with our UK office and have managed to get things basically working.  It's not a hugely demanding situation, but the connection speeds are not that great, and it takes a LONG time to open the file in the morning.  After that it gets better, but crashing is not too much fun.

So I'm just asking people out there if they would care to share a little experience and any hints they may have.  How serious are latency issues ?  Any dos and don'ts that are not in the documentation ?  (I'm guessing that the documentation is like most Revit documentation ... not quite perfect)

What are the alternatives, for a medium size practice that will continue to do most of it's work on a local network ?  When will C4R reach the Middle East ?  (not expecting an answer to that one, but I'd love to know)

Share your experience, point me to a link.  It's a genuine question.  We are stumbling into new territory.  Trying to get some input from our local reseller also, but it seems they also don't have much experience in this area. 

So that's it.  I've overheard people grumbling about Revit Server and I prefer not to fall over horrible latency issues and break my leg.  Forewarned is four-legged  (who said that recently)

No pictures, shock horror !