Tasked with creating a new museum on Liberty Island to house the valuable artifacts from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island is an honor in and of itself. High Concrete Group, LLC, a family-owned company that has delivered precast concrete structures for nearly 50 years, was named Precast Winner for the Statue of Liberty Museum for the Tekla BIM Awards.
Posts Tagged ‘construction’
High Concrete Group Wins Precast Category Tekla BIM Award for Statue of Liberty Museum
Friday, October 5th, 2018AECCafe Voice Special Report: What Makes for BIM Interoperability?
Thursday, September 27th, 2018The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex and huge models.
For AEC firms, it is very common to use multiple software products within the same organization, as well as outside the organization. No single BIM software solution or integrated system can fulfill the requirements of the AEC industry. All these products throughout the design process need to be able to communicate with one another.
Standards organizations have come forward to suggest that they have the answer to interoperability in the BIM world. But currently what most vendors are able to achieve is perhaps an increase in interoperability. Does anyone offer total interoperability?
Some of our respondents define BIM interoperability in this way:
“Interoperability is about handing over the right amount of information, to the right people at the right time,” says David Lash, product manager, Trimble, Tekla Structures Division. “It’s about hitting milestones for people who want to stay up to date with the wider project, even on a daily basis.”
“Communication, communication, communication,” says Joe Eichenseer, director, Building Lifecycle Solutions, North America IMAGINiT. “Interoperability allows us to communicate better and reduce or eliminate the chance of translation errors between systems.”
Vectorworks 2019 Packs a Punch with Increased Design Efficiency
Wednesday, September 19th, 2018Last week Vectorworks released the 2019 versions of Vectorworks Architect, Landmark, Spotlight, Fundamentals and Designer, as well as BraceworksTM and Vision. Significant improvements have been made in increased design efficiency through overall performance and quality, plus innovations to greatly improve the 3D and BIM modeling, 2D documentation and presentation workflows for architectural, landscape, interior design and entertainment designers.
In an interview with Vectorworks CEO Biplab Sarkar, he talked about the importance of the new release, including 3D site model sculpting; the unique ability to have BIM objects display with varying levels of detail in plan, elevation and section drawings; enhanced openBIM interoperability; and a new partnership integration with AutoTURN online for analyzing vehicle swept paths.
“We improved and streamlined the creation of drawings from the models,” said Sarkar. “The primary reason BIM models are used is for people to drive presentation drawings from the models. When you have an object, a kitchen sink or an appliance and you want to present in different views: side, front and back view, for example, you really need a simplified presentation depending upon the scale of the drawing. So, what we introduced is 2D from 3D components for hybrid objects. If you look at the object from the top plan, it will give you a simplified top plan view and if you look at it from any other view it will show a 3D presentation of the object.”
The 2019 version extends the view from the top plan to other views. You can have a left view, front view, bottom view, and all these views can be stored in the object. You can choose low, high or medium view selection and specify so details can be changed depending on the view. You simplify the view depending on the scale. For very small scale and everything close together, you don’t want to show all the details of the object, and for a large scale you want to display all the details of a complicated object.
R&D MOU Drafted Between GRAPHISOFT and Surbana Jurong
Wednesday, September 12th, 2018GRAPHISOFT and Surbana Jurong Consultants, a Singapore-based multi-disciplinary urban, infrastructure and management services consultancy firm, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) effective September 3, 2018, to cooperate and collaborate in BIM, Virtual Design & Construction (VDC), and Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD)-related research and development to combine their different areas of expertise. GRAPHISOFT will focus on BIM and related software technologies, while Surbana Jurong will focus on design and construction domain.
The Architecture of Temporary Housing
Friday, September 7th, 2018The need for temporary housing has arisen in recent years for various reasons. For one, there have been more natural disasters in the world, and/or other situations that require finding temporary housing for large numbers of people very quickly. There are also creations such as described in the article, How Burning Man is Built, a temporary city that evolves in the desert from scratch for a massive festival, attracting people from all over the globe. Each year, a team of 21 surveyors spend seven days laying the lines and waypoints of a 5.62-mile plan, creating the largest and most iconic art installation at Burning Man – the city itself.
Vancouver Fraser Port Authority Implements Autodesk Vault
Thursday, August 30th, 2018Responsibilities of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority are vast, as they manage stewardship of federal port lands in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The port authority oversees and manages over 16,000 hectares of water, more than 1,000 hectares of land, and approximately 350 kilometers of shoreline, bordering 16 municipalities and intersecting the asserted and established territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations.
The port authority’s mandate includes handling permits for all projects for proposed federal port lands use and is responsible for real estate management. It also manages infrastructure development designed to support growth and efficient operations.
In order to manage all this, the port authority maintains a repository of AutoCAD drawings. They have been AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D users for a long time.
Maintaining source drawings from many systems such as water, communication, electrical, storm, sewer, and more is what the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Spatial Data Group does on a daily basis. Team members create plans based in these systems and want to query features from each of them. One of the primary problems was that those features could be unintentionally removed from the source drawing if the user didn’t detach it before saving the working file. It could then be gone forever. The team really wanted a solution that could automatically create an audit trail displaying everyone who had modified a file.
Joe Hedrick, manager, Infrastructure Solutions for IMAGINiT, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice on how the port authority found a solution for tracking and safeguarding its CAD drawings in the form of Autodesk Vault.
AECCafe BIM Interoperability Questionnaire
Friday, August 10th, 2018The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex models.
AIA+2030 Online Series Seeks to Inspire Architects to Meet the Architecture 2030 Challenge
Wednesday, August 1st, 2018The Architecture 2030 Challenge, adopted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), offers a path to reducing the building sector’s negative impacts and reaches for carbon neutral design as standard practice by the year 2030. The building sector is the single largest consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Designed to provide continuing education credits, the AIA+2030 Online Series provides courses in high performance design, building a comprehensive understanding with each class in the series. The series will teach and inspire architects to meet the 2030 Challenge through design strategies, efficient technologies and systems, and the application of renewable energy resources.
Cosential Gets Funding from JMI Equity to Accelerate Product Innovation
Friday, July 20th, 2018Cosential is a CRM market leader and proposal automation software for Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms, that recently closed a deal of a $34 million strategic growth investment from JMI Equity, a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software companies. The funding will be used to accelerate market development, expand corporate infrastructure and continue fueling the company’s rapid pace of product innovation. Dan Cornish, CEO of the company Cosential, spoke with AECCafe recently about Cosential and its role in the AEC industry.
Cornish began Cosential in 1999, as a way to help large AEC firms win large projects. What he realized was that a crucial problem people had was pulling data together.
How did you start out building Cosential?
I started building online systems early on and then started building Cosential and over the years I sort of bootstrapped it from there to get to this point today, where we have the biggest market share for CRM in the AEC industry. So many people want so much from our tool, it made sense for me to bring on a financial partner who would help me grow and realize the financial vision I’ve had all these years, because I want to help customers have better businesses. It’s such an old-fashioned industry and people have been managing with spreadsheets. The tools that are out there are either very old, not industry specific or they require an enormous amount of customization that they never get quite right and so we build a purpose-built tool for this industry and it solves a lot of problems.
3D Repo Adds Clash Detection to 3D Diff
Thursday, July 5th, 20183D Repo, digital construction technology provider, has announced Clash Detection functionality has been added to their 3D Diff, software that identifies clashes in construction plans by analyzing 3D models that have been submitted by project partners and contractors.