Michael Leighton Beaman, a visiting design and technology critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, is principal of the firms Beta-field and GA Collaborative.
The advantages of using a tablet as a sketchbook are numerous, including its ability to share, post, or store digital sketches; incorporate images and photos; export to other formats or devices; and, of course, undo.
The Sefaira plug-in for Revit displays energy analysis within Revit's modeling environment. Following last year’s release of several tools, including an energy analysis plug-in for SketchUp, the five-year old software company Sefaira has released a revamped plug-in for Autodesk’s Revit. The new plug-in offers both daylighting and energy analysis in real-time within Revit’s native modeling environment. According to Sefaira CEO Mads Jensen, the latest release provides analysis “as close to the model as possible.” Sefaira’s focus on immediate feedback benchmarked against 2030 Challenge targets and other industry standards allows architects to “incorporate performance analysis into every design decision,” says Jensen.
While working on a monumental fish sculpture for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Frank Gehry’s office developed its own software to manage the complexities of the project and gain greater control of the design and construction process. During the design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in the late 1990s, they refined this software into what became Digital Project. By 2002, Gehry Technologies (GT) was born. A spin-off from the design office, GT offered architects the software and expertise that came from realizing Gehry Partners’ complex buildings. On Tuesday, GT revealed it has spun off Digital Project into an
Sefaria's web-based service generates a profile of each building model's energy flow. Today, Sefaira, an energy analysis service for digital building models, launched support for Autodesk Revit. Following the release of their real time analysis plugin for SketchUp in November, Sefaira is intensifying its efforts to integrate energy analysis and performance visualization into the digital design workflow. These new products provide “early and frequent analysis, so analysis can shape design,” says CEO Mads Jensen. The SketchUp plugin is a fast, lightweight complement to Sefaira’s more robust web-based analysis service, which was introduced in 2012. The Sefaira for SketchUp plugin utilizes
A screenshot of the Dynamo interface running inside Revit. Over the past few years developers of software for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries have called into question the role of the desktop computer in design. They have either produced software that exploits the desktop’s computational power or have abandoned it as a design tool entirely. This marks a significant change in focus—from software that facilitates the production of digital versions of traditional architectural documentation to the expansion of design capabilities through advanced computational modeling or desktop-free design production reliant on mobile devices and cloud computing. Recognizing this trend, Autodesk
Photo courtesy SHINE Architecture SHINE Architecture and TAarquitectura used Rhino 5 to help retrofit a university building in León, Mexico. In November, Robert McNeel & Associates released the fifth version of Rhinoceros (Rhino), a 3-D-modeling program for Windows. Rhino, which began as a program for naval design 20 years ago, gained a foothold among architecture students and young designers in the early 2000s by offering a low-cost and intuitive platform. That user base has grown substantially in recent years with the introduction of Grasshopper, a computational design plug-in that allows designers to code visually. Today those students have moved into
A new mobile device app digitizes a tool long cherished by architects and designers. The Morpholio Trace app allows users to sketch on layers of tracing “paper.” Mobile devices have seen unprecedented growth recently. Apple alone has sold over 84 million iPads in the last two years. It is clear these devices have changed the culture of digital-media consumption, but have they changed the way designers work? The Morpholio Project, a digital-media company started by practitioners and academics in the design professions, enters the currently limited field of design-oriented mobile-device apps with the goal of expanding productivity beyond the studio
