We’re getting some great responses to our call for pictures of your copy of Mastering Revit Architecture 2011 out and about. Here are the latest entries.
Court Myers from Oklahoma City spotted Yoda brushing up on his Revit skills… “You must unlearn what you have learned.”
Robert Yori from New York makes sure that his copy of MARA 2011 gets the proper amount of fresh air and exercise…waiting for the bus:
And soaking in the sights on Wall Street:
As of Friday July 16, Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011 has been shipping in the continental United States – all 5-1/2 pounds of it! We know we have some really creative friends, so let’s just see how creative you can be…
Step One: Get a copy of MARA 2011 here or here.
Step Two: Take a photo or short video of the book out ‘in the wild.’
Step Three: Email it to us
Step Four: Don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon…please!
If your entries are creative and cool – remember, we’re big South Park/Futurama/Family Guy fans – we’ll post them right here for everyone to see.
Our first pic is from fellow Revit guru, Mark Schmieding. He snapped this self-portrait while the film crew for Transformers 3 was causing mass destruction outside his Chicago office. We like to follow the words of director Michael Bay who once exclaimed…”I demand things to be AWESOME!”
Not from Mark, but on the Transformers theme…
The first sighting of our new book – Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011 – has been reported in the US! Eddy got his shipment of promo copies today and just take a look at the size of this one…
Eddy, Phil and I are really proud of the content we’ve developed for this year’s edition. We hope you’ll enjoy it, too. As always, feel free to drop us a line at MasteringRevit or visit our Facebook page.
It’s still available at the discounted preorder price on Amazon.com, so hurry up before it goes up to regular price.
On July 12, 1960, the Etch-A-Sketch went on sale. An article in WIRED explains more about how this timeless toy does what it does.
Simple: “An internal stylus is used to…sketch onto a glass window coated with aluminum powder.”
Complex: “…employs a fairly sophisticated pulley system that operates the orthogonal rails that move the stylus around when the knobs are turned.” Try making a perfectly diagonal line on one!!
Anyway, I was immediately reminded of an image my friend Eric Bobrow of Bobrow Consulting once shared with me:
Are you still using CAD? Have you ever thought of what CAD really is? Think about it…
Just a quick note that I will be giving a lecture in New York City at the Center for Architecture on July 13. My presentation is titled “buildingSMART in Architecture” and will be focused on how the design profession needs to step up to the plate and provide more relevance to the building process before builders and fabricators take over our services – and fees. Several project case studies from HOK will be presented to support the notion of using BIM and integrated design and delivery to support life-cycle information stewardship, rather than just the latest way to deliver paper documents.
Registration is free, but you must RSVP at the AIA NY website by clicking here.
So I decided to take Eddy up on his challenge to model the volume of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico by the BP disaster because it was just announced that the actual oil spilled may now be double the original estimates. Reuters says that approximately 2 million barrels may have leaked since the event on April 20.
2 million barrels =
84 million gallons/317 million litres =
415,895 cubic yards/317,975 cubic meters
How big is that? I started to build some masses in Revit to visualize this volume. First, I used an American NFL football field (160’ x 300’ – end zones excluded). The mass would be about 234 feet (71.3 m) tall. I then linked in a model of the Lever House office building (SOM) in New York. If I modeled a mass based on the footprint of the tower, the oil spill volume would be almost 1,400 feet (426 m) tall!
Here’s a link to download a 3D DWF file of this model to explore the scope of this disaster on your own.
Writer and theorist Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, contributed a fascinating commentary in the latest East Coast issue of The Architect’s Newspaper entitled “What Style is That?” Unfortunately the article has not appeared on the newspaper’s website, but if it does I will update this post. (The original essay appeared in The Architects’ Journal in May 2010.)
The term “parametricism” was first enunciated at the 11th Architecture Biennale in Venice and has since been gaining momentum. In the Arch Paper commentary, Schumacher gives an updated version of the Parametricist Manifesto. Here are a few excerpts…
“Parametricism offers a new approach to architecture on the basis of advanced computational design tools and techniques…” and as a style is “marked by its aims, ambitions, methodological principles, and evaluative criteria, as well as by its characteristic formal repertoire.”
“The concept of style has long been losing ground within architectural discourse. And the reassertion of the concept as a valid and productive category calls for a conceptual reconstruction in terms that are intellectually credible today. What stands in the way of such a reconstruction is the tendency to regard styles merely as a matter of appearance, as well as the related tendency to confuse styles with short-lived fashions.”
Schumacher proposes that “architectural styles are best understood as design research programs conceived in the way that paradigms frame scientific research programs. Thus, a new style in architecture is akin to a new paradigm in science: It redefines the fundamental categories, purposes, methods, and innovative course of a coherent collective endeavor.”
“As a conceptual definition of parametricism one might offer the following formula: Parametricism implies that all architectural elements are parametrically malleable. This implies a fundamental ontological shift. Instead of the classical and modern reliance on ideal, hermetic, or rigid geometrical figures – straight lines, rectangles, cylinders, etc. – the new primitives of parametricism are animate, dynamic, and interactive entities – splines, nurbs, and subdivs – that act as building blocks for dynamic systems like ‘hair,’ ‘cloth,’ ‘blobs,’ and ‘metaballs’ that can be made to resonate with each other via scripts.”
As this movement/style gains even further momentum (see current projects in Kuwait, Dubai and Abu Dhabi), will we start to see more requests from clients to design them a “parametricist” building? Food for thought… Do yourself a favor and get a copy of the East Coast June 2, 2010 edition of The Architect’s Newspaper to read the complete article. Original version of this essay and the images above appeared in The Architects’ Journal in May 2010.
Volume makes things harder to comprehend mainly because 51% of the industry is still using CAD. So, a football field (l x w) x 80' deep is something that you could make with the Revit massing tool, but even when you zoom out, it looks small.
My excellent colleague Greg forwarded this video to me. It was created by the developers of Archicad and it shows collaborative workflows between their BIM platform and Revit Structure as well as Revit MEP. This integration is enabled completely through the use of IFC files (Industry Foundation Classes) which are supplemented by free Revit plug-ins that optimize the IFC output. The IFC files are then merged into Archicad using specific filters based on the origin of the export. After merging, the imported model geometry is fully editable.
Recent blog posts on Revit OpEd and Bolt Out of the Red diminish the importance of IFC’s in a Revit BIM environment, but I say that this type of sentiment is short sighted in realizing the bigger picture. I can see the value of developing a direct and specific port for data using a fully open API, but does that mean that every program in the AEC market needs to develop a Revit plug-in for interoperability? Surely, Autodesk needs to spend some time improving the IFC import/export capabilities of Revit and we intend to share some necessary (and reality-based) areas for improvement.
As an aside, I have written a complete chapter in Mastering Revit Architecture 2011 titled “Interoperability: Working Multi-platform” which has all sorts of real world scenarios for sharing data with Revit. I hope you find it useful when the book hits the shelves.
While visiting HOK’s St. Louis office this week, I was surprised to see a board out in our public area announcing a “book signing.” The main problems – the book hasn’t been published yet and I was in meetings all day long for two days. Now…if I was able to attend this mock signing, I’m not sure what I’d actually be autographing; however, I hope I get another chance to have a meet-and-greet in other offices.
The intention was noble and free pastries are always appreciated by the staff! As it turns out, even Gyo Obata was eager to discuss the upcoming book with me. Hopefully, this is the first sign of fun times ahead of us.
By the way, we finally have a new cover design for Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011. Check it out on our Facebook page.
There’s still time to register for James Vandezande’s webinar on building information modeling offered by NYU. The session will take place on Wednesday May 19 from 1:00 – 2:30 pm Eastern US time. The registration fee is $150.
While this session may not appeal directly to the devoted BIM experts who read this blog, I encourage you to recommend this session to senior team leaders who may not have begun to drink the Kool Aid yet. My webinar will review the essential concepts (what is BIM/what isn’t BIM/BIM tools), the benefits and business case for BIM (uses/opportunities/goals), and how BIM relates to integrated project delivery (IPD).
Webinar attendees will be able to interact with me and ask questions. Feel free to even set up this broadcast in a conference room and share the information with several colleagues.
Here’s the direct link to register:
http://www.scps.nyu.edu/course-detail/R61.8103/20102/building-information-modeling-bim
In a previous post, I had briefly mentioned my fascination with Pandora – the internet radio service based on the Music Genome Project. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s quite a brilliant idea. Sign up for free and enter a band name or a music genre and Pandora does the rest. Zach Kron had an interesting description of the ‘parametric thinking' established by your artist selections.
The Music Genome team creates parametric magic by listening to all kinds of music and rating each song based on about 400 attributes such as beats made for dancing, cool jazz qualities, vinyl ambiance, and electric guitar riffs.
ABC News had a feature story on Nightline that included an interview with Pandora founder Tim Westergren:
If you’re a 90’s grunge music junkie like me, you probably list bands like Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and Meat Puppets as some of your favorites. I spent most of my five years at architecture school listening to Bleach, Ten, Insecticide, Dirt, Jar of Flies and other amazing albums (try the soundtrack to Natural Born Killers…it was a late night studio staple for us!). The loss of legendary artists Kurt Cobain (d. April 1994) and Alice In Chains front man Lane Staley (d. April 2002) might have even prompted some of us to launch anti-heroin campaigns, but alas, what happens to our favorite bands when tragedy strikes? Dave Grohl (Nirvana drummer) went on to form the excellent rock band Foo Fighters; but what would Alice In Chains do next without Lane’s harmonic offset to guitarist Jerry Cantrell? The band reunited in 2005 and brought in vocalist William DuVall. In September 2009, they released their first album in 14 years titled “Black Gives Way to Blue” – which I found by creating an “Incubus” station on Pandora! (phew)
Their new album is one of those rare comebacks that captures the original essence of the band. Black Gives Way to Blue has the haunting harmonies reminiscent of Jar of Flies (1994) and grinding riffs like their breakthrough album Dirt (1992). A couple of the songs remind me of Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star, but in total I find myself listening to this album over and over again. Only about 6 albums fit into that category for me!
