“Definitely the Mother Ship has landed here in Cupertino.”
Apple’s proposed new headquarters is a spaceship-like structure design that has just received approval from the city of Cupertino to go ahead with the building.
The 2.8 million-square-foot Star Trek clone, shaped like an enormous donut, is expected to be situated on a site in a man-made forest on the northeast corner of Cupertino. Apple Campus 2 will be located where HP and Compaq used to be located and has gotten the okay to go ahead with building from the city next month. While the entire campus maintains a space like-modern-age theme, the most prominent building is the big four-story donut designed by architect Norman Foster of Foster and Partners, who has designed many notable and extraordinary buildings including the Gherkin in London and the Reichstag restoration in Berlin.
Stefan Behling, a Foster and Partners architect on the project, said that the building is “one of the most environmentally sustainable projects on this scale anywhere in the world.”
Dan Philbrick, senior product line manager in the infrastructure division at Autodesk, spoke with AECWeekly regarding the company’s new Autodesk Vehicle Tracking 2014 software for vehicle simulation, based on field-proven technology assets recently acquired from Savoy Computing Services in the UK.
The winner of the “Innovation in Building” Category in the Bentley Be Inspired Awards held in London during the “Year in Infrastructure 2013” event this month was the Cancer Treatment Centre for Guy’s and St. Thomas Hospitals, London.
Sefaira’s CEO Mads Jensen talked about the new Sefaira for SketchUp, a SketchUp plugin that provides architects with real-time energy analysis without leaving their native design environment.
Bentley’s annual Year in Infrastructure event is a showcase for the company’s Be Inspired award winners in various industry categories, as well as an opportunity for the company to demonstrate some of its new directions and product releases. Some of the big topics this year were the introduction of Bentley’s Cloud Services added to the platform, the SaaS Project Sharing Services, the potential of a health information model, the new Innovation page where users can view and comment on new research and development.
One BlackFriars Road, London, Ian Simpson Architects
Bob Batcheler, executive vice president of strategy, Newforma, talked with AECCafe Voice about the new Newforma software for project information management.
Newforma software for project information management arose in response to the need for ways to bridge the disparate systems that architects, engineers, and builders use to manage projects and project information. As a result, integration has always been an important part of the software’s design. (more…)
Pat Kannar, Director of Product Marketing, Dell Precision, talked about the release of the Dell Precision M3800 ultra thin and light 15-inch workstation that represents the last product in their portfolio line of ultra workstations. Kannar said this is the first thin and light workstation in the market.
“This M3800 most exciting platforms we’ve delivered,” Kannar said. “It fits in end-to-end solutions, and is one of the most smartly designed platforms for engineering, design, and for those creating products and energy systems.”
Customers have wanted a thinner and lighter workstation without compromising performance, and this workstation delivers all that. “It has all the traditional components you have in a workstation, quadcore, CPUs, professional graphics, NVIDIA, great memory and storage options put it in a form factor 18 millimeters thin,” said Kannar.
The M3800 is less than ¾ inch thin (18 mm) and weighs 4.15 pounds, with dual cooling to keep it running cool and quiet, and up to 10 hours six minutes of battery life. It has NVIDIA Optimus graphics technology that also maximizes the battery life. NVIDIA provides QHD 3200×1800 pixel display with multi-touch capability. The chassis is made from anodized aluminum and carbon fiber chassis which is very lightweight and durable. (more…)
In a Q&A with Sefaira’s CEO Mads Jensen, he talked about the firm’s cloud solution for sustainability analysis, designed for early building design stages.
AECCafe Voice: Why would anyone use Sefaira when most major CAD software companies have their own cloud setups for their own software products?
Sefaira is the only firm to offer a seamless and intuitive solution for sustainability analysis, specifically created for the early stages of building design. Because of this, more than 200 leading design firms have adopted Sefaira as their main solution for high performance building design today.
Sefaira does not compete with CAD / BIM solutions from existing vendors, but rather integrates directly into existing design processes and tools. In this way, Sefaira complements existing design tools, and provides our users with a best of class experience for high performance building design, and – for this reason – we are the fastest growing solution for high performance building design, growing by more than 33% in the last quarter alone.
AECCafe Voice: What does Sefaira provide for early stage analysis that is not provided by current early stage analysis software?
The key features that differentiate Sefaira and make it particularly suitable for early stage analysis are:
Easy and intuitive use – user interfaces are specifically designed for architectural design at the very early stages, allowing users easy exploration and comparison of design options
Speed –Sefaira runs analysis in seconds, comparing strategies and combinations of strategies to fully understand all options and make the right decisions in a time-scale that is compatible with the needs of early stage design where decisions often need to be taken rapidly
Clear, print-quality outputs – Sefaira facilitates discussion among project stakeholders and makes the decision making process faster and more seamless
Parametric analysis – Sefaira response curves enable the designer to optimize key design parameters such as shading, glazing ratio and building orientation in seconds where this historically could take weeks
Support – Sefaira’s engineering team provides outstanding client support as well as training, webinars and documentation to make performance analysis easy for non-engineers
AECCafe Voice: What is the cost of using Sefaira, and what is the pricing model?
Sefaira is Software-as-a-Service with an annual enterprise-licensing model for an unlimited number of users within a firm. The cost depends on the number of projects that are analyzed with Sefaira. The starter price is $5,000 and covers 3 projects per month.
AECCafe Voice: How does the cost and efficiency compare to existing offerings?
Sefaira requires less training than other tools and is much easier to implement within architecture firms. By implementing a practical tool for performance analysis our customers are able to meet requirements that would otherwise be hard or impossible to meet.
Our customers are telling us that because of Sefaira they have been able to win more business, reduce their design costs and avoid costly rework to meet sustainability targets during later project phases, and that no other solution for sustainable design offers such a compelling return on investment witnessed by the rapid growth of our client base.
Lightworks, a leading supplier of rendering solutions announced the release of Artisan for ZWCAD+ in a technology partnership with ZWCAD Design. Artisan is an intuitive and affordable rendering application for high quality, fast visualization.
Lightworks has created an API that allows plug ins and connectors for such products as BricsCAD, TurboCAD and Archicad. They have also written an AutoCAD one but never released it. Clive Davies, business development director, said, “The reason for this is that Autodesk already has rendering functionality built into AutoCAD and other products. The clone products, those using DWG format, are less likely to already have rendering built in and so many of them would like that capability in their products. The clone products plus the rendering application are also less expensive than a seat of AutoCAD.”
According to the press release, Artisan is used worldwide by designers and architects. The release of Artisan for ZWCAD+ means that users can now visualise designs within their design workflow. The unique Artisan ‘bridge’ into ZWCAD+ allows current
drawings to be directly linked, with no need to export, therefore creating an efficient design and visualization workflow. Artisan includes high quality drag and drop material libraries and SnapShot feature that enables the creation of unlimited iterations of the same design. This simplified workflow results in a shorter design cycle and faster time to market.
David Forrester, Chief Executive Officer at Lightworks commented; “We’re pleased to be partnering with ZWCAD+ to bring our easy-to-use rendering application Artisan to ZWCAD+ users worldwide. At Lightworks we create solutions to work with existing user-workflows and we’re proud to say we now provide the ZWCAD+ users with affordable rendering technology that works intuitively with their CAD system.”
Daniel Huang, Product Manager at ZWCAD+ commented; “3D visualization enhances realism by leveraging the power of today’s rendering technology whilst also enhancing the effects that are difficult to achieve using 2D alone. The combination of Artisan and ZWCAD+ means users can flexibly handle more diverse architectural and interior tasks using high-quality rendering.” (more…)
