In last month's newsletter on the AIA 2007 National Convention and Expo, I provided a brief overview of the new release of Revit Architecture (formerly known as Revit Building), which was demonstrated by Autodesk at the show. Going by the officially released seat count, the adoption of the Revit platform has doubled in the past year, which doesn't come as much of a surprise, given the growing interest in BIM among all the players and stakeholders in the AEC industry. This, in turn, allows Autodesk to continue to invest heavily in the development of all the Revit-based disciplinary BIM solutions. Let's look at the improvements that this annual development cycle has engineered for the architectural users of Revit in the 2008 release...
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In a 3D building model, individual objects can be digitally linked with the time element from a construction schedule to enable project managers to play the construction sequence for review. This mechanism is termed 4D CAD, where the fourth dimension is time...
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Not that long ago, most building professionals would have classified sustainable design merely as an interesting idea. But awareness of climate change and other environmental issues has catapulted it to center stage. The international movement toward sustainability has created a flood of new green building regulations and initiatives around the globe and sustainable design practices -- once considered niche -- are now widespread...
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It’s the last lesson of the day at Ridgewood School in Doncaster, but not all the kids in year 11 are going home yet. Sixteen pupils will be hard at work until at least 5 o’clock, not because they have been put in detention – this is their GCSE construction class.
This afternoon, Ridgewood’s 15 and 16-year-olds are being introduced to building design programme Autodesk Revit. Sitting in rows in the glass-fronted modern engineering block, the pupils’ eyes are glued to their flatscreen monitors, with only a low murmur of voices as they tweak their on-screen house designs. One student is planting six fir trees around a one-storey house. Another is putting the finishing touches to a roof...
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Like many architecture firms, FOX Architects of McLean, Va., and Washington, D.C., has decided that making the transition from CAD to building information modeling (BIM) is a strategic business imperative. The 80-person multidisciplinary firm (architecture, interior design, landlord services, graphic design, and multimedia design) is engaged in a transition process that will unfold over the course of the coming year and beyond, and has generously agreed to allow, for the purposes of this column, the broadest possible access to the firm’s staff (within contractual confidentiality or security constraints) to document the firm’s experiences. We’ll be checking in periodically to see how the transition process unfolds...
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While the concepts behind "building information modeling" or BIM have been around for almost two decades—Graphisoft's ArchiCAD solution, for example, was developed on model-based principles from the start—it was exactly 4 years ago when Autodesk embarked on a series of events in major cities across the US, designed to educate its customers about the benefits of the BIM approach embodied in its recently acquired Revit product. I had attended one of these events held in January 2003 in San Francisco. (An article I wrote about that event can be seen here.) Even at that time, the vision of BIM that Autodesk presented was not restricted to the design phase; it was anticipated that the benefits of BIM could extend to the construction, and operation and maintenance phases as well, making BIM the cornerstone of an integrated "building lifecycle management" process...
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