Cadalyst - April 2008 - (Page 14)

techtrends By Kenneth Wong The Summer of BIM A counterculture design festival breaks down the usual barriers. W hat if one summer — or in this case, winter — a bunch of idealistic architects, designers, building owners, contractors, and consultants decided to do away with the professional hierarchies, business protocols, and legal constraints that have long prevented them from working together? What if they converged on a destination and simply spent the day exchanging ideas about the high-rises, hospitals, ﬁrehouses, and schools they envision building there? The Woodstock of BIM (building information modeling), as the organizers prefer to call it, took place this winter (figure 1). On January 31, soon after sunrise, 133 individuals from Boston, Maryland, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and elsewhere (http://bimstorm. com/LAX/play) began to transform the 60 city blocks east of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles (figure 2). A day later, they left behind 420 buildings, encompassing 54,755,153 square feet. Perhaps the most astonishing number is the total mileage traveled by the participants: zero. How could this be? Because the 24-hour design fest took place in virtual space, courtesy of Onuma Planning System (OPS), a Web-based BIM collaboration platform. The Fruits of a Dream When Kimon Onuma founded his architecture practice in 1988 in Pasadena, California, he was following in the footsteps of his father, who began his Tokyo architectural firm in 1972. Onuma sincerely believes the building industry is ripe for a revolution. In December 2007, he had the idea for a free event that would bring together a cross-section of the industry. He dubbed it BIMStorm LA. For the event to succeed, he figured it needed several crucial elements: u It had to be conducted in real time. u It had to be hosted via the Internet (so people could see one another’s ideas). u It should have no lag time (so an architect wouldn’t have to wait two weeks after he or she had submitted something to get feedback). u It had to be based on open and interoperable data standards (figure 3). Onuma already had in his possession the technology that could facilitate this gathering. OPS, his company’s flagship product, is the software-as- Figure 1. The Woodstock-inspired poster for BIMStorm LA. a-service (SaaS) model for BIM. You don’t have to install software. You simply go online from a browser to use the OPS features. The OPS IFC Model Server would function as the central repository to host all the projects and the entries. For modeling and analysis, players could use Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD, BIMStorm LA http://bimstorm.com/lax Design Atlantic www.designatlantic.com Earth Our Only Home www.earthouronlyhome.com Nemetschek North America www.nemetschek.net Onuma Planning System http://onuma.com 14 Figure 2. The 50-million-square-foot area east of Dodger Stadium was the focus of BIMStorm LA. www.cadalyst.com cadalyst April 2008 http://bimstorm.com/LAX/play http://bimstorm.com/LAX/play http://bimstorm.com/ http://www.designatlantic.com http://www.earthouronlyhome.com http://www.nemetschek.net http://onuma.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - April 2008

Cadalyst - April 2008 Contents Editor's Window Cad Central The Summer of BIM Thin Is In — Large LCD Monitors Caligari trueSpace 7.5 — 3D Modeling Software HP Compaq 8710w — Mobile Workstation Autodesk Design Review 2009 — Design Viewing and Collaboration Software Getting Better — What Should You Learn? Technical Uses for Nontechnical Software AEC on Macs Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Tips Rain Down on Harry

Cadalyst - April 2008

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