Back To School

2002 - Preschool


2003 - Kindergarten


2004 - First and Preschool


2005 - Second and Kindergarten


2006 - Forgot to take pictures - close enough. :)


2007 - Kindergarten, Second and Fourth


2008 - One, Three, Five


2009 - 2, 4, 6


2010 - Third, Fifth and Seventh

There's an app for that

Architects are constantly trying to find new and inventive ways to reach out, make contact with clients, and differentiate themselves from all the rest of us trying to do the same thing. With more than 50M iphones sold and being used out there (even if you can't call from the iphone 4), it seems to be a great way to reach a lot of people very quickly.

I say this, because I came across the first app I've seen for architects looking to showcase their work. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson architects extraordinaire and designers of the Apple Stores have made an app for that. Pocket BCJ. It's a simple little app that slide shows the firms work across the country.


Now if they'd only design the Apple stores in Revit. How cool would THAT be?

NYC Revit Users Group, August 2010

The next monthly meeting of the New York City Revit Users Group is this Thursday, August 5 at 6:00 pm Eastern. The featured topic is “BIM for Project Delivery: Methods that Approach Integration” with Scott Wood, AIA, LEED AP from Tishman Construction.

This presentation will explore uses of BIM in post construction document phases, discuss contract language that relates to these uses and describe methods for delivering models that can be efficiently deployed for these uses.

If you are in the NYC area, please RSVP at our meetup site (www.meetup.com/nyc-rug) or you can register for the webcast by clicking here.

In the Wild, Part Whatever

It looks like MARA is really making the rounds.

Robert Yori had a couple sightings -
MARA out with friends enjoying a candle-lit dinner:


And doing what MARA does best: teaching Revit. Note the attentive (slightly confused) eyes of the students.


Finally, my own personal sighting. Angiela and I enjoyed sitting a spell during a hike on our vacation to Upper Mohawk lake. Elev. 12,100'. MARA decided to enjoy the lake view too.

In the wild, ey!

Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011 is finally starting to ship to our brothers up north in Canada. Jay Polding sends us a couple of shots plugging the Ontario Revit Users Group as well as Canada’s main export…

Mmmmmm…beer.

In the Wild, Part 5

I recently took a day off (imagine that!) and spent the day with my family at our local water park. This would have made for some interesting new ‘in the wild’ pictures, but you can imagine what the water slide would have done to a copy of MARA 2011… Here are some of the latest entries from our readers.

Sean Burke from Seattle poses a copy of MARA 2011 in front of the city model at NBBJ:

One of my personal favorites…another submission from David Light getting quite literally ‘in the wild:’

So don’t be a tortoise…make like a hare and pick up your copy now! If you already have, please write a review on Amazon.com.

One small step...

...will become a wonderful, slippery slope. :)

More info here. This ruling is really big news. In part this will:

-- allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers.

-- allow people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws.

-- allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.

-- allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.

-- allow blind people to break locks on electronic books so that they can use them with read-aloud software and similar aides.

iPads are next. And speaking of iPads...Mastering Revit 2011 looks amazing on it. That's right! Downloadable versions should be available as eBook and Kindle versions in a few days or so. Here's a screen grab from the Table of Contents.



FULL color (where we used color images) were used in printing the e-versions. We didn't want to simply reuse the same converted gray scale images used for printing the physical book. What's really neat is the figure references are hyperlinks to their associated image. And you can even double+click an image to 'zoom' in for more detail!

Here's and example from chapter on Film and Stage, showing details from the "Watchman" movie of the Karnak fortress and armatures from Dr. Manhattan's lab.



Been holding out for an iPad and need something to help push you over the edge? Think of it this way: if you buy Mastering Revit 2011 for the special price of only $550 we'll throw in the iPad for free! ;)

In the Wild, Part 4

Before we get to our latest ‘in the wild’ pics, we’d like to toot our own horns just a bit more…please forgive us. In the product details for Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011 on Amazon, we have been holding steady as the #1 book in the categories of CAD, Drawing & Modeling and even Autocad! THANK YOU to all of our early adopters!!

Moving on to our ‘in the wild’ submittals…Steve Stafford creates a surreal composition of beer and scale architecture while attending the SCRUG meeting…

Our own MARA 2011 contributing author, David Light, got his copy today and shows it off in the London office of HOK…

In the Wild, Part 3

In today’s episode, Brok Howard from St. Louis gets some rest and relaxation with his copy of MARA 2011 in the beautiful Citygarden:

But what should you do with your previous editions of Mastering Revit Architecture? Don’t throw them out! Take Tobias Hathorn’s suggestion for MARA recycling…

Keep those fun pics coming! See our original post for instructions on how to submit your own ‘in the wild’ photo.

In the Wild, Part 2

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:

Mastering Revit ‘In the Wild’ pics

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.

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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…

Mastering Revit in the wild!

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.

Happy 50th Birthday, Etch-A-Sketch

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…

Event: buildingSMART in Architecture

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.

Friday Reprieve #22

Found this early this morning over a cup of coffee. As you might now, I love the weird, random things you can find on the internet. Here's a simple list of some Father's Day ideas from that same, whacky source.

Personally, magnetic bacon tops my list. Happy Friday.

Corrections, Context and Comments

Looks like those previous estimates may have been a bit low. Now we're looking at 30,000 - 60,000 barrels a day. Over 60 days. At 60,000 barrels a day? 3.6million barrels. 151.2million gallons. 202million cubic feet. That's a oily, goo filled cube under 300'x300'x300'.

How big is the gulf? 615,000 square miles. Or an area just under 785 miles x 785 miles. Or 4.14million feet x 4.14million feet.

At scales like this, it's kind of hard to put it into context.

Imagine this. Spilling one cubic foot of oily goo (just under 7.5 gallons) in an area that is 13,800' x 13,800' (2.6 miles x 2.6 miles).

Or spilling a gallon of oily goo (the contents of your engine - about 231 cubic inches - about a 6" cube) in an area that is just over 6,900 feet x 6,900 feet. That's a 6" cube over an area of 1.3 x 1.3 miles.

Or this: one dice (3/4" x 3/4" x 3/4") in an area of that is just over 862 feet x 862 feet.

I'm just saying.

Could someone run these numbers and double check?

Revit and the oil spill

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.

The Parametricist Manifesto

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.

Stop. Do This. Wait. Now Do This. No This.

Interesting articles in the NYT on the alleged effects of dependence on technology. Another interesting and related article on the difficulty of unplugging.

"Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?"

If by children you mean software companies that alternate between not listening to their customers at all and wanting to listen so much that it leaves you wondering if they've done their homework...then the answer is yes.

Anyway, my scores are in the image at the top of the page.

In other news, iPhone 4.0 is being released today. And it's a really big deal. The iPhone is not a cell phone. The iPad is not a Tablet PC. They represent new technologies that are displacing incumbents by creating new ecosystems.

Don't bet on hardware. Don't bet on software. Bet on ecosystems that represent the next computing paradigm.

More to follow.

Try modeling THAT!

For those of you tracking the oil spill in the Gulf, someone (my wife) forwarded me a handy little tool that will help you gain some perspective on the whole issue. I know everyone talks about millions of gallons of goo but it's all kinda hard to put into perspective when you have that much goo and it's covering so much area. I know Phil did some quick calculations to figure out that OTD (Oil to Date) is a football field 80' deep. But even still. If you're a designer, you can probably conceptualize 80' in height. But that's still a challenge. 80' is like this billboard. But without a dude in sneaks, it's still kinda hard to get and that's before you add volume to the conceptualization.

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.

But what does this and OtD really mean to you? Well, for me, it would mean that if it were a cloud, it would cover enough area from Lawrence, KS to Columbia, MO. Which is somewhere in the neighborhood of a LOT. Check it. You can enter your own city and see what kind of colossal damage it's creating. Now the next question is how much of a carbon offset would you need to eradicate this mess? How many of us over how many days would need to walk to work, not turn on all the lights in the house, video conference in lieu of flying, hug a tree, etc to make up for this?

Archicad and Revit IFC workflow

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.

Phil Read is awesome

Honestly - or at least today - I mean that.
Part of the glorious job of book writing is updating all 231 sample Revit files we include with the book for the reader's general edification. That is Open > Save > Close. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. It's kinda boring and took me a couple glasses of wine to complete.

In that process, I came across the image below which is what you see when you open one of the several files Phil included in his chapter on stairs and railings. If you don't get it, he created monorails and elevated train cars using stair railings. Did you get that? With stair railings.

I am so freakin' beyond impressed. I might actually read that chapter.

ACAD for Mac - Part II

Sunday started out with this revelation.

But really, this isn't the most interesting part of the thread. Further down, there's this:

Solidworks for the Mac.

So while ADSK's next big thing may be creating bringing a 20 year old idea to brand new hardware, Dassault may be working on BIM for the MEP space. Where is ADSK on Inventor? Or Revit? Where's the forward thinking at ADSK?

If ADSK is really working on Mac for OSX, the announcement will result in the sound of crickets chirping followed by snoring. People that have ACAD are already running it now.

Up next, GM announces a car that runs on gasoline....

Book signing – without the book!

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.