Cadalyst - April 2008 - (Page 15)

techtrends Autodesk’s Revit, Nemetschek North America’s VectorWorks Architect, Roland Messerli AG Informatik’s EliteCAD, Square One Research’s Ecotect, Google SketchUp, or anything compatible with Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standards. Supporting documents and site data could be supplied in Excel, Google Earth, and even pen and paper (so long as they could be scanned and brought into the communal environment). After a planning session and a practice run, teams began to form. Team A included two architects and a government agency employee with expertise on project request submittals. Team V included an architect in North Carolina and two architects in Maryland, who also happened to be software developers from Nemetschek North America. In Team E, a Revit user was paired with an ArchiCAD user. Several people joined the foray as spectators. Code reviewers, structural analysts, LEED specialists, and green consultants also stood ready to offer input from the sidelines. On the designated day, at 11 A.M. in Boston, 4 P.M. in London, and 6 A.M. in Honolulu, the BIMStorm struck. Figure 3. The use of open standards allowed projects created in different BIM tools to coexist in Google Earth’s virtual terrain within the Onuma Planning System. Green Moon Rising “Essentially, there were teams designing, teams analyzing, and they were all interacting with one another, too . . . Analysts were submitting their reports without the teams even realizing that they were working in the background,” said Onuma (figure 4). One of the analysts was Karen Weber, a green-roofing consultant and cofounder of Earth Our Only Home. “I’m neither an engineer nor an architect,” she admitted. “My company’s main mission is to get green roofs on buildings.” Weber issued a general pitch to the teams, outlining the type of green roof that would work best in Los Angeles’ climate and is currently being developed by Roofscapes (www.roofscapes. com) — “a dual-media green roof with specific drought-resistant plants that weighs about 40 pounds per square foot and costs about $15 [per square foot] to install,” she said. She points out that, aside from the aesthetic appeal, the green roof saves April 2008 cadalyst www.cadalyst.com Figure 4. While the design teams were working on the geometry, some analysts were running code checks (top); others were performing airflow analyses (bottom) on the available models. 15 http://www.roofscapes.com http://www.roofscapes.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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