Chaos, a specialist in arch viz software, has acquired EvolveLab, a developer of AI tools for streamlining visualisation, generative design, documentation and interoperability for AEC professionals.

According to Chaos, the acquisition will reinforce its design-to-visualisation workflows, while expanding to include critical tools for BIM automation, AI-driven ideation and computational design.

Founded in 2015, EvolveLab was the first to integrate generative AI technology into architectural modelling software, demonstrating the massive potential of mixing imaginative prompts with 3D geometry. Through its flagship software Veras – which AEC Magazine reviewed back in 2023 – EvolveLab connected this capability to leading BIM tools like SketchUp, Revit, Vectorworks, and others, before expanding into smart documentation and generative design.

Looking ahead, the role of AI in traditional visualisation software will only expand, making the acquisition of EvolveLab a smart strategic move for Chaos. It will be fascinating to see how the two development teams collaborate to integrate their respective technologies.

Read what AEC Magazine thinks

Even before the acquisition, designers relied on the combination of EvolveLab and Chaos tools, using Veras and Enscape to accelerate both design and reviews. In the schematic design phase, this means rapidly generating ideas in Veras before committing the design to BIM where Enscape’s real-time visualisation capabilities pushes the project even further.

“Over a year ago, we began exploring AI tools to speed up our workflows and were excited to discover Veras, a solution specifically designed for AEC that seamlessly integrates with host platforms,” said Hanns-Jochen Weyland of Störmer Murphy and Partners, an award-winning architectural practice based in Hamburg, Germany. “Veras is now our go-to for initial ideation before transitioning to renderings in Enscape. This powerful combination accelerates concept development and ensures reliable outcomes.”

“At Cuningham, we integrate EvolveLab’s Veras and Glyph alongside Chaos’ Enscape to enhance our design process,” said Joseph Bertucci, senior project design technologist of Cuningham, an integrated design firm with offices across the United States. “Using both Enscape and Veras allows us to visualise, iterate, and explore design concepts in real-time while leveraging AI-driven enhancements for rapid refinement. Meanwhile, Glyph has been a game-changer for auto-documentation, enabling us to efficiently generate views and drawing sets, saving valuable time in project setup. These tools collectively streamline our workflows, boosting efficiency, precision, and creativity.”

Chaos and the EvolveLab teams are exploring ways to integrate their products and accelerate their AI roadmaps. EvolveLab products will remain available to customers. The EvolveLab team will join Chaos, with Bill Allen serving as director of product management and EvolveLab chief technology officer Ben Guler as director of software development.

EvolveLab apps include Veras, for AI-powered visualisation; Glyph, for automating and standardising documentation tasks; Morphis, for generating designs in real-time; and Helix, for interoperability between BIM tools.

What AEC Magazine thinks

Like many long-established architectural visualisation software developers, Chaos has undoubtedly sensed growing competition from AI renderers over the past few years.

While tools like EvolveLab’s Veras aren’t yet mature enough or offer the necessary control to replace software like Enscape, they are already capable of handling certain aspects of the arch viz workflow—particularly in the early phases of a project. AI renderers can also enhance final outputs, improving visual quality. In fact, last year, Chaos introduced its own AI Enhancer for Enscape, which uses AI to transform assets like people and vegetation into high-quality, photorealistic visuals—minimising the need for high-poly, resource-intensive models.

Looking ahead, the role of AI in traditional visualisation software will only expand, making the acquisition of EvolveLab a smart strategic move for Chaos. It will be fascinating to see how the two development teams collaborate to integrate their respective technologies.

While EvolveLab’s AI rendering technology and expertise were likely the main drivers behind the acquisition, Chaos has also gained access to powerful tools for BIM automation, AI-driven ideation, and computational design. In our interview with EvolveLab CEO, Bill Allen  last year, he spoke of the company’s ambitious vision, including auto-generated drawings.

With the launch of Enscape Impact last year—bringing building performance analysis into Enscape’s real-time environment—Chaos has already shown its willingness to expand into new areas of AEC technology. Now, with advanced AEC design tools in its portfolio, it will be interesting to see how the company continues to evolve.

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Generative Design (GD) is a technology-driven approach to optioneering designs by using algorithms to explore a vast number of possible solutions based on defined constraints and goals.

By inputting parameters such as unit mix, desired building heights, spatial layout requirements, and performance criteria, GD software generates numerous design options. This allows designers to evaluate and select the most optimal solution. Instead of manually crafting each option, designers can review a wide range of solutions, filter and adapt them further, enabling new creativity, or simply getting optimal answers faster for clients.

The expanding landscape

As the popularity of GD has increased, so has the number of available tools. This is both exciting and overwhelming.

It is clear that GD software developers have identified early stage feasibility as an area that GD can be applied to effectively. The software should help designers make decisions faster, using data to confirm project viability, and communicate options more effectively than traditional CAD/BIM authoring tools. However, this presents a challenge for professionals to learn which one is best for them, manage licence costs, and then understand how to integrate them into their own tech stack effectively.

Breaking down barriers to adoption

Despite the promise of GD, there are still notable barriers to adoption for many AEC professionals.

1. Time to Learn: GD tools have opened the door for many users to explore data driven design but within a proprietary format, without a steep technical learning curve of visual scripting. GD tools still require time and effort to master, which can pose challenges for busy professionals.

2. Cost: Licensing fees vary from free trials and low introduction fees, to expensive Software as a Service (SaaS) models. When added to the growing list of software required for AEC workflows, this is an additional cost that puts pressure on companies already struggling to manage cash flow. While GD tools may offer long-term savings by accelerating workflows, the recurring monthly costs can deter adoption.

3. Workflow Integration: Not all GD tools integrate smoothly with existing software ecosystems, which can create friction. Users often rely on a core suite of tools, and if a GD solution disrupts these workflows, it may slow productivity. Ensuring compatibility and ease of integration with a company’s preferred BIM authoring software is crucial for broader adoption.

4. Functionality: These tools are new and are continually expanding the range of functionality they offer. However, no single tool has managed to provide the comprehensive design functionality that meets all user needs. A careful study of requirements is required to make sure the software does what is needed.

Find this article plus many more in the Nov / Dec 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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A tool for clients and developers

An emerging trend among ConTech software companies is a shift of focus from selling to architects to targeting developers and clients, who may wish to understand site potential before hiring a design team. Tools that automate site analysis and feasibility studies allow them to receive insights into purchases at a much earlier stage. This has an impact on the architect’s traditional role particularly in the early-stage design process.

This shift presents both opportunities and challenges. While it may reduce architects’ involvement in early feasibility studies for some clients, it also creates an opportunity for architects to use these tools for clients who seek deeper data insights but prefer not to use the tools directly.

By accessing data and insights generated by GD solutions quickly and easily, architects could provide value faster, creating more refined designs that align with clients’ initial requirements. This approach suggests architects should adapt, adopt a solution, and potentially provide new services for clients. GD users could enhance their role in delivering data-driven projects with this approach.

Risks and challenges

While the potential benefits of GD are clear, there are some risks that users should consider carefully:

1. Quality vs. quantity: The ability to generate a multitude of designs quickly can be both a blessing and a curse. With too many options, architects may face decision fatigue, or find themselves sacrificing quality for speed.

2. Cost and learning barriers: For many architects, especially smaller firms, the cost and time to learn required to adopt these tools remains a hurdle.

3. Dependence on technology: Over-reliance on GD tools can sometimes overlook essential design considerations that come from experience, intuition, and human creativity. Designers who depend heavily on GD software should augment this with a hands-on design approach that allows for unique, site-specific insights.

How to assess GD tools

With the growing variety of GD tools, users need a consistent way to evaluate software that goes beyond features and marketing hype. This is why at ADDD, we have developed an assessment criteria, based on the Future AEC Software Specification (FASS).

The aim is to enable a consistent approach to reviewing software so different tools can be compared to each other. This assessment methodology was presented at AEC Magazine’s NXT DEV conference and has now been used to assess four Clash Detection and Issue Management software.

The outcome is a quantitative framework of questions designed to bring clarity and consistency to software evaluation. When combined with a qualitative approach, where users can communicate their findings and thoughts, a report can be produced that supports the AEC industry to have a consistent way to assess software.

GD tools will undoubtedly disrupt early-stage ‘‘ design within the AEC industry, offering powerful capabilities that allow users to explore, create, and iterate with unprecedented speed

The assessment provides a structured, objective way to assess GD tools on critical factors such as ‘Designing in Context & Scale’, ‘User Experience’, ‘Modelling Capabilities’, and the other criteria from the FASS. By applying the FASS criteria, users can identify tools that align with their needs, budget, and project demands, allowing them to make decisions that suit their requirements. This approach not only simplifies the selection process but also ensures that chosen tools meet the demands of modern AEC workflows.

I am also advocating for Best For …’ results, rather than one software being better than another, as this is too simplistic. In a landscape flooded with options, having a consistent assessment method like the FASS can be invaluable, helping users to navigate to the appropriate GD tool that is ‘Best For Their Needs’.

N.B. Information about the assessment criteria can be found here . ADDD also welcomes feedback on how software is assessed.

Charting a way forward

GD tools will undoubtedly disrupt earlystage design within the AEC industry, offering powerful capabilities that allow users to explore, create, and iterate with unprecedented speed. This will require adaptability, a consistent structure to assessing software, and a way to help strategic decision-making within organisations.

As GD options continue to search for their specific niche, AEC professionals have the opportunity to explore and embrace these tools as allies in their work, with the opportunity to lead to better client outcomes. With resources like the FASS Assessment, users can assess, compare, and select the solution that aligns with their organisational goals, empowering them to succeed in a digital future that balances creativity with technology.

Learn more @ NXT DEV

At NXT DEV in June Allister Lewis presented ADDD’s assessment methodology based on the Future AEC Software Specification. See the presentation here.

NXT DEV 2025 will be held at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London on 12 June 2025

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TestFit, a specialist in feasibility software for property development, is gearing up for the launch of Generative Design, a new tool that uses computational AI to optimise building layouts. The software enables designers to explore a multitude of design possibilities without having to learn how to script.

TestFit has been developing building optimisation technology since 2016. The company’s ‘Site Solver’ product allows users to generate site plans ‘instantly’ with real-time insights into design, cost, and constructability. Earlier this year the company released ‘Urban Planner’ a free urban planning tool with customizable massing tools (read this AEC Magazine article).

Generative Design is the next step forward for TestFit, allowing AI to test site solutions, on its own, based on specific project requirements. It is said to work for sites of all scales from multi-family development to industrial buildings.

Click here to watch the full talk from Clifton Harness as he introduces TestFit Generative Design at NXT BLD 2024

“Real estate development is innately bespoke. Every piece of land is unique, requiring every building to be a prototype,” says Clifton Harness, CEO and co-founder of TestFit. “While experience and local knowledge can be applied to decision-making, with Generative Design, a machine can test every possible configuration, inclusive of what we would never even think to try.”

Traditionally, generative design requires a deep expertise in complex computational algorithms. But, according to TestFit, with Generative Design, users can easily define the targets they need with filters like floor area ratio (FAR), parking ratio, and yield on cost, to find the best option for their specific needs.

“TestFit Generative Design begins your project with a goal, allowing you to start with an optimized site plan. We believe this approach enhances both productivity and creativity,” adds Harness.

TestFit Generative Design will be available later this month.

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The space to the north of London’s King’s Cross railway station has been undergoing an urban transformation for more than 15 years. Residential apartments, offices, a shopping complex and more have been built in and around the area’s historical buildings, drawing Londoners to a part of the city that people used to avoid.

Global engineering firm Arup has been involved in much of the work, including designing the structural elements for one of the final development projects: King’s Cross R8. The project consists of two 13-storey buildings joined by a podium, combining affordable social housing with rental space for small business owners.

A key challenge on the project was the location, with the development running immediately adjacent to three brick tunnels constructed in the 1700s. All the trains going in and out of King’s Cross station run through these tunnels, which are sensitive to movement. As a result, every design milestone for anything constructed within a certain proximity to the station had to first go through an approval process with London’s rail-network operator.

Such approvals can understandably take time and potentially knock a project off schedule. But thanks to the use of parametric design and BIM – specifically through the Tekla-Grasshopper Live Link – the team from Arup was able to keep the work moving.

Parametric design, or data-driven design, is guided by a set of interconnected parameters and roles, defined and inputted by the engineer, with these parameters then generating or controlling the design output into a parametric BIM modelling tool. Through the use of tools such as Grasshopper, engineers can benefit from the ability to quickly run various design iterations to optimise the structural design, as well as aiding the creation of the geometrically complex. What’s more, with all parameters and data interconnected, the change management process is also automated and simplified.

Arup senior structural engineer and project lead, Gordon Clannachan, explained: “We had to produce a number of drawings for the network-rail approval process. Although these needed to be done at an earlier stage than we would typically do on projects, they allowed the client to fast-track the approvals process prior to the main contractor starting on site. Using Tekla to automate the BIM model was essential for this work. As the design scheme evolved, we were able to respond very quickly thanks to Tekla’s automation-enabling tools.”

The team put parametric design at the heart of all the project’s workflows, pushing or pulling data and geometry to and from Tekla Structures to improve the efficiency of everyday tasks. The engineers also created a script that automated the calculation of the loads bearing down on the concrete columns and walls. This helped to further optimise the design and reduce the amount of concrete in the building’s foundations.

Arup also used the Tekla-Grasshopper integration to develop their own scripts for calculating the embodied carbon footprint of all structural elements. The Tekla Organizer tool was then used to set up templates to export the embodied carbon of every element by material, and for different embodied-carbon stages. These calculations were reported against targets that have been set for 2030 and beyond.

“We have a responsibility to take ownership of the embodied carbon in the structures we design and to use our influence to reduce the carbon impact of our projects,” said Gordon. “If you really want to influence carbon-related decisions, then you need to automate these calculations. The live-link integration between Tekla and Grasshopper is great for this too. We built the carbon factors into the Grasshopper script and parametrically linked the data.”

“I always try to look for ways to do each project better than the one before, rather than just defaulting to repeating the same methods. Pushing automation into our workflows makes us more efficient in how we deliver projects and respond to changes. The structural team believed in what we were doing and put a lot of hard work into developing these tools, which we can now use on the next project too.”

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As a society, living in a technological age, we have become incredibly used to rapid change. Sometimes it feelslike the one constant we can rely on is that everything will change. For millennia humankind lived in caves, scrawling drawings on the walls. The Stone Age was 2.5 million years long, then came the Bronze Age and, with it, urbanisation, which lasted 1,500 years. The first Industrial Revolution lasted just 80 years (1760 – 1840). Before we reached our current, digital age, the Wright Brothers perfected powered flight and just 66 years later, our species had escaped Earth’s gravity, traversed the vacuum of space and landed on the moon. We are making advances in ever shorter timeframes and have industrialised innovation through the development of ever-smarter tools.

The next revolution is already here but, as the saying goes, it will not be evenly distributed. At the moment, many aspects of our working lives are still going through digital transformation. Everything is becoming data and the more that becomes centralised, the more insights it enables, offering a greater opportunity for knowledge processing.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have gone from science fiction to science fact and are rapidly being used by increasing numbers of industries to improve productivity, knowledge capture and in the creation of expert systems. Businesses will need to transform as quickly as these technologies are deployed as they will bring structural and business model changes at rates which we have not yet truly anticipated.

In the last few months, I’ve seen demonstrations of design technology currently in development that will, at the very least, automate labour intensive detail tasks and perhaps greatly lessen the need for architects on certain projects.

First warning

During the lock down in 2020, I watched with interest an Instagram post by designer and artist, Sebastian Errazuriz. It soon became a series and more of a debate. He said, “I think it’s important that architects are warned as soon as possible that 90% of their jobs are at risk.”

His argument condensed down to the fact that architecture takes years to learn and requires years of practice. Machine learning-based systems can build experience at such an accelerated rate that humans cannot possibly compete.

As we already have millions of houses, enormous quantities of data, including blueprints, why do we need a new house when we can have an AI trained and then blend of all the best designs? “Now try to imagine what 1,000 times this tech and 10 years will do to the industry,” concluded Errazuriz.

 

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The interesting thing is, at that point in time there was very little technology offering anything like that. Perhaps Errazuriz had seen Google’s Sidewalk Labs which was experimenting with generative design to create and optimise neighbourhood design. At the time I thought it was a good marketing ploy for himself, although the comments turned into a pile-on.

Current AI reality

We are still some way off from fulfilling anything like the true potential of AI in generative design, a view shared by Michael Bergin of Higharc, who used to head up a machine learning research group at Autodesk. “The full impact of a generative model that uses a deep learning system, what we call an Inference Model, is not ready for primetime yet but it’s incredibly interesting,” he says.

But there have already been several fascinating applications of AI/ML in AEC. Autodesk, for example, has delivered some niche uses of the technology. Autodesk Construction IQ is aimed at project risk management in commercial, healthcare, institutional, and residential markets. It examines drawings and identifies possible high-risk issues ahead. AutoCAD has a ‘My Insights’ feature, which examines how customers use their AutoCAD commands and what they do. The AI will then offer tailored advice to help improve productivity or how to better use tools.

Like all hype cycles, the impact of machine intelligence on jobs will be overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long-term

There are also a range of adaptive and ‘solver’ tools available such as Testfit, Autodesk Spacemaker and Finch 3D, which all solve multiple competing variables to help arrive at solutions that are optimised. While not strictly AI/ML, their results feel like magic and actually help designers make better informed decisions and reduce the pain of complexity.

Bricsys has also been investing in AI. Bricscad BIM doesn’t use the Lego CAD paradigm of modelling with walls, doors, windows etc. Instead the user models with solids and then, using the BIMify command, runs AI over the geometry, which it identifies as IFC components, windows, floors, walls etc.

AI applications so far have either predominantly been at the conceptual side or have tried to ‘learn’ from the knowledge of past projects.

Recent advances

Over the last two years, in conversations with AEC firms who were fed up with the limitations of their BIM tools and were looking for significant productivity improvements, many seemed to turn to wanting to completely automate the 2D drawing process.

While drawings are a legal requirement, heavily model-based firms are calculating that they could save millions by just having AI take over that and then they could spend more time on design. Around the time of our NXT BLD conference in June 2022, I started to see early alpha code of software which was looking to apply AI/ ML to design. And, in subsequent conversations with some design IT directors at leading architectural firms, there was an appreciation that for many standard, repeatable buildings types – schools, hospitals, offices, and houses – automated systems will soon heavily impact bread and butter projects.

One firm was already running projects in the Middle East with an in-house system which only required one architect, whose task was to define and control the design’s ‘DNA’, with the rest of the team being engineers, focussed on streamlining fabrication. I’ve also seen a demonstration of a system that just requires mere polyline input to derive fabrication drawings for modular buildings, missing out detail design completely. There’s also Augmenta, which is looking to automate the routing of electrical, plumbing, MEP and structural detail modelling.

Another gift from lockdown was construction giant Bouygues Construction working with Dassault Systèmes to develop an expert system based the 3D Experience platform (Catia for us old schoolers).

Drop in a Revit model and the system outputs a fully costed, documented virtual construction model for fabrication – all based on the rules, processes and machines, which Bouygues has defined in its workflow, all managed through its Dassault Systèmes’ Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) backbone.

While the system is based on configuration and constraints and low on AI/ ML, there is a drive to build expert systems, bespoke systems to harness a company’s well-defined internal processes. Like Higharc, the rise of the platform to solve niche market segments is also more likely to be the case for next generation tools.

Pictures that infinitely paint

Ten years ago, machine learning systems were only just getting a hang of identifying what the subject of a photograph was. Is this a bear or is this a dog? Today’s systems can write entire paragraphs defining a scene from its computer vision. This advance is probably just as well, as there are already automated taxis with no human drivers in San Francisco driving around picking up passengers – Cruise and Waymo.

The rise of DALL-E, Midjourney, DeepRender and Stable Diffusion have flooded social media with all sorts of amazing images. In this issue you can see the work of many readers who have been experimenting with these tools, to great effect. Trained on billions of photographs and now allowing users to add their own, from week to week this technology seems to be rapidly advancing to a point where the output becomes useful at the conceptual phase of design.

That’s a view shared by computational designer / digital artist, Hassan Ragab, one of the most accomplished users of the technology. “There will be a point in the near future where these tools could be directly employed into the design process,” he says. “For now many architects and designers are using it as sketching / inspirational tools, but for me, I am just trying to explore what these tools mean to our creative process; by trying to push my imagination to its limits and visualising what is on my mind using these powerful tools (and also to observe how these tools are changing how my mind works).”

Second warning

In August 2022, Sebastian Errazuriz was on Instagram again, this time identifying that illustrators will, unfortunately, be the first artists to be replaced by AI. Illustrations are commissioned based on text descriptions, which is how these AI systems work.

“The only difference between a human and the AI is that it takes a human about five hours to make a decent illustration that’s going to be published. It takes the computer five seconds” said Errazuriz.

He went on to recommend jumping in as fast as humanly possible to understand how the tools work and for illustrators to use their abilities to augment these designs. Experience will now help artists learn how to better describe an image to the machine.

 

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I recently spent a weekend with friends who own a visualisation and media company. One of the partners confided to me that he thought that being a creative, he would never have to compete against artificial intelligence. In the last two months his company has had to invest hours of time learning to make use of and understand how these new tools can be harnessed for their business. They even have clients that are requesting to use AI generated presentation speakers, which read out written text in their videos to save money. It would seem Errazuriz is certainly more on the money.

AI to BIM?

Having seen the incredibly consistent midjourney building designs by Hassan Ragab and followed the community, it was interesting when a UK company called Kaedim popped up which appeared to be developing a service to convert 2D images to 3D mesh models. I contacted the CEO, Konstantina Psoma to see if we could try out the service.

Kaedim was designed to offer a service to the games industry a SaaS platform to quickly convert 2D assets into 3D meshes for games content. We sent over one of Hassan’s complex models and got an OBJ file back containing a single meshed object. It was interesting to see the interpretation but obviously there was no detail on any of the other sides of the building. Psoma had warned me that Kaedim hadn’t been trained on architectural assets but was up for giving it a go.

With the complex nature of the midjourney output, I next put through a photograph of some early modernist architecture, which was very rectilinear, this gave much better results. I then tried to put the mesh through Bricscad BIM to see if the BIMify command could turn it into a BIM model.

While I was hoping this would deliver the world’s first AI concept design to BIM model, incompatibilities in the software meant it fell a little short. Kaedim creates a single sealed mesh, whereas Bricscad BIM is expecting multiple meshes in its models. However, it did come temptingly close, especially with simplified geometry.

At some point these AI systems are most certainly going to start producing 3D models based on description, or the AI will be capable of rendering all façades, enabling some degree of 3D. Instead of feeding them flat 2D models, imagine an AI trained on every awardwinning architectural 3D model, or all the changes to architectural vocabulary throughout history, from Imhotep (2,700 BCE) to Zaha Hadid Architects (2016). Or an AI engineering system, which generates a fabricable engineering design of a hospital at 1:1, but allows the architect to design the façade panels, possibly inspired from another AI tool?

Conclusion

AI/ML, configurators and solvers are coming and coming fast. Over the next five years it will be fascinating to see how this all unfolds. To stay ahead of the game, the best survival advice is to familiarise yourself with these new systems, when you get the chance.

Established BIM developers of the existing tools are working out which elements of their software AI/ML can be applied to. These could be as boring, but essential, as stair design, to form optimisation, based on multiple analysis criteria.

This piecemeal approach to improvement will please existing users but won’t radically change the process. It will be for others, with nothing to lose, to come up with more powerful design systems which offer higher speeds of concept to design throughput. The focus might not be on architectural design but on construction because of the value benefit that could be applied.

Augmenta, for example, is looking to automate all the phases of detailed design. If this were to be driven into fabrication as well, the whole process might also go from 3D model to G-code.

Like all hype cycles, the impact of machine intelligence on jobs will be overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long-term. From what I can see, efforts are being made to automate detail design, together with drawing production.

Both of these tasks are highly demanding and require sizable teams to carry out mundane work, and coordinate design changes. Automation could ultimately bring about reductions in head count at firms. The dream about having more time to design may hold some truth, but architects would need to change their business models, as billing by the hour and having a change driven fee structure is not going to survive the impact of automation in detail design.

The other thing that comes to mind is that, with all this time compression technology and ability to turn a process which has traditionally taken years into maybe weeks, it doesn’t really allow for the nature of humans and the reality of clients changing their mind.

I remember hearing of one successful collaborative BIM project that coordinated its project teams on an office building design and got early sign off from the client, at which point they ordered the steel. Much later, the client changed their mind on the design, but it was too late as the steel had been cut. AI might help deliver zero clashes and vastly reduced waste, but we can’t forget about the state of flux which is core to human condition.

AI in architecture: by Clifton Harness, CEO of Testfit

It was scheme “F0” fully printed and delivered to higher-ups for review. This baby was the sixth major site plan design, but the tenth minor iteration that slightly improved the developer’s financial outcome. Finance said it was a winner.

On the walk back to my desk at 11:14pm, I counted the units, again. 253. Good. I counted the parking stalls. It was ready for review. The next morning, I arrived to review “F0” and caught my 30-years-an-architect boss hard at work counting the stalls and units. This is when it really hit me: software has barely scratched the surface of building design. I think that this thought, in this moment, was the TestFit founding moment.

I was so deeply struck with the very real absurdity that industry-wide hundreds of thousands of hours are spent checking math on parking stalls. Imagine if we could fix that? Or more meaningful things? Like improving the hit rate for housing projects. Or to employ artificial intelligence to enable humans to comply with the rise of ever more complex zoning and compliance codes more ably?

Now to the meat of how I see AI playing out in architecture:

AI in architecture will result in better architecture, as long as there is actually a human architect running that AI. This will put the modern architect at a crossroads: do they embrace technologies that can make them super architects or do they reject them and watch the engineering and development industries embrace them? Either way, we will get better buildings, and the choice is the architect’s now.

If user-editable configurators like TestFit’s technology are employed, the project team has detailed control to achieve the design vision. It enables software engineers to use meaningful procedures to develop forms and understand why they break. The major strength (or weakness) to procedures is that they are all human-informed.

In the past few years, we have seen very impressive machine-learning algorithms start to tackle things like noise, daylighting, energy use, or microclimate analysis. These are promising, but ultimately computers were the ones doing those analyses anyway. The definition of form to meet project requirements continues to be the fundamental task at the heart of the design process.

Mixed-AI workflows are also quite promising. An example of this is using a simple procedure to generate massing, and then to ask a neural network for its best guess on column sizing for said mass.

Another thing I am absolutely convinced of: all these avenues of AI penetrating the architecture industry will still go through architecture firms. I’ve worked personally with hundreds of real estate developers, and nearly all of them would prefer to work with architects that have a long track record of success.

The real fear, I think, for the architecture industry, is when the Startup Development or Start-up Architecture shops start to leverage this technology and develop asymmetrical advantages over real estate investment trusts (REITs) or the Genslers of the world. AEC has always been soft on process, and AI is the process holy hand grenade.

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AEC Magazine has been at the forefront of promoting BIM for almost 20 years. A few years ago, it was becoming clear that the amount of development work being put into many leading AEC applications was on the wane, so we set an editorial agenda to identify where the next innovations would come from, and examine how the industry would have to adapt — mapping itself from current processes to new digital workflows.

NXT BLD is the physical embodiment of our mission to explore new technologies and boldly go where no industry events had gone before!

Topics include VR-based design, robotic assembly, offsite construction, 3D printed buildings, digital twins, photogrammetry, robots on construction sites, real-time rendering, collaborative design, knitted buildings, generative design, mixed reality, city modelling and blockchain.

Topics and speakers, almost entirely come from the research we do for editorial, or from recommendations from people in practice, who may be part of ongoing R&D, either in-house or with a university. While in the past, technology had tended to be dictated by vendors, we are now seeing a much more hands-on approach to tech stack and workflow development from leading practices, something we covered in our January / February 2021 cover story.

Now, as the AEC industry moves to complete digitisation, academics, startups and established mature BIM customers have been looking to converge tools and processes, to meet their future needs

At our November event, which is now available to view free on-demand, we were lucky enough to have a stellar line up of industry heavyweights. This includes speakers from the Foster + Partners Advanced Research and Development (ARD) group, Cobus Bothma, director at KPF, Greg Schleusner, director of design technology and innovation at HOK, Dr Marzia Bolpagni, head of BIM International at Mace, and Emily Scoones, business and project lead at Ramboll.

These practices didn’t present case stories about their use of procured technologies, but showed their in-house developments and shared their goals.

This trend can also be seen in previous NXT BLD talks from the likes of Woods Bagot, Facit Homes, Gensler, Skanska, Herzog & De Meuron, Katerra, Laing O’Rourke, to name but a few. Expect more next year and an increase in the amount of AEC firms collaborating together in software development.

Automation has always seemed a great fit for construction. Even at our first NXT BLD event we had a prototype robotic assembly system from Arup and the amazing Arthur Mamou Mani.

Two years later and NXT BLD 2019 heralded the first appearance in Europe of Boston Dynamics’ SPOT robot, marking its launch into construction. That year we had R&D teams from laser scanning firms flying in with 3D printed mounting plates to try out their laser scanners on the robot, as it was their first opportunity to see SPOT in the ‘flesh’.

Foster + Partners also met SPOT for the first time at NXT BLD 2019 and this year the R&D team presented their findings on the potential of the robot for use on live projects and in the future. Meanwhile, Trimble’s Construction Robotics Lead also talked about the growth in robot adoption on construction sites.

As workstation CPU and GPU capabilities forge ahead, the ability to handle more complex geometry, on a city scale, in real time has finally become a reality. This isn’t just helping those involved in arch viz, but also virtual reality and augmented reality.

The AEC sector is also taking influence from beyond. This year we took a bit of a gamble asking Aston Martin to present, but it really paid off. Cathal Loughnane did a great job of explaining the Aston Martin design team’s philosophy which applied to everything from cars to residential buildings, to watches. As the AEC industry looks to change its workflow, it can’t remain an echo chamber. So we will continue to bring in speakers from other industries to see what we can learn from their digital design to manufacturing processes.

While NXT BLD examines early market trends, it also has the opportunity to follow these developments as they flourish and adapt. But, more importantly, how they are seen through the eyes of technology savvy users and within the context of real projects.

For future NXT BLD conferences, expect to hear more on the connection between architectural design and digital construction. This is a huge topic with a long way to run. There will certainly be more AEC firms discussing their own inhouse and collaborative developments, as the call for industry openness and productivity improvements grows – against the background of a seemingly slow-to-react commercial software market which is focussing elsewhere.

In the meantime, all of the presentations from NXT BLD 2021 are now available to view completely free on-demand, so grab a coffee and dive in. You’re welcome.

Location independent design – collaborative design

Cobus Bothma, KPF

Today’s leading architectural practices are experimenting to develop their own bespoke solutions, using the exploding resources of open-source components. Bothma demonstrates a number of tools he has created for use on KPF projects, connecting designers with different skill sets to enhance the internal iterative design process.

Other challenges included: ‘How to get a full BIM model, Grasshopper model, and 40km2 of modelled London at 150mm accuracy in front of a user, with real time capability, when we can’t control their hardware?’ The answer: Nvidia Omniverse. Bothma has expanded this to mixing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis with real time graphics and virtual reality (VR).

Changing perspective and changing vision

Cathal Loughnane, Aston Martin Design

Aston Martin is a classic British sports car brand which blends its racing heritage and craftsmanship with the latest digital design technology.

As the AEC market looks to other industries to learn, Loughnane gives us his insight into how Aston Martin has expanded its design practice to motorbikes, helicopters, watches and residential development.

A key take away is that even with all the new digital technology at Aston Martin’s disposal, nothing is held in more esteem than the hand-crafted 1:1 clay model of the car – keeping true to the 108 years of Aston Martin DNA.

Creating balance

Greg Schleusner, HOK

BIM has been on the desktop for over 20 years but we have ended up spending more time documenting the design. As the AEC industry looks forward to improve productivity and refine workflows, Schleusner questions historic concepts of BIM tools and makes insightful suggestions as to what BIM needs to be able to do to evolve beyond its current document-centric limitations and ‘dumb’ models.

Silos are a major problem for the industry, data needs to flow more openly and in a more co-ordinated manner, between all tools and workflow participants. Schleusner is calling on AEC firms and developers to work together and cooperate on making the design process flow before AEC gets subsumed with new challenges.

From design to Digital Twin and beyond

David Weir McCall, Epic Games

Epic Games is looking to extend current BIM workflows to add real-time rendering, pedestrian simulation, LiDAR and digital twins. Weir McCall looks at how firms like HOK are using Twinmotion, Unreal Engine, Cesium and 3D Repo to model city-scale projects and co-ordinate design teams and interaction with the public.

Foster + Partners is experimenting with extending its real-time model assets to have Augmented Reality onsite to bring its designs to life. Digital twins means many things to many people but Unreal is focussed on contextualising data, from many different sources, in real time to all be displayed in the context of a model.

Buildmedia’s detailed model of New Zealand is amazing.

The NASA Control Room for Construction

Dr. Marzia Bolpagni // Mace

Bolpagni starts this talk by looking at the limitations of Level of Detail (LoD), acknowledging that different people require different data at distinct phases of a project and that most data created in the design phase is not formatted or useful to construction. She then suggests this can this be improved by using frameworks that are based on the level of information – why, when, who and what.

Mace has also been actively researching and benchmarking an ‘AEC production control room’, like NASA had for each space flight — a design room for project data, collating all project metrics for filtering and display.

Bringing digital twins within hands reach

Greg Demchak, Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems is the biggest proponent of digital twins and has also led the charge into reality modelling. Demchak comes from the research side of the company and has been experimenting and connecting Bentley with both large and small development firms to capture ultra-high resolution photogrammetry to build digital twins. The twins are then hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud and streamed to collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) sessions, using Hololens headsets with physical hand interaction.

Demchak uses an example of bridge inspection, scanned by drone, automatically modelled in 3D and then used to identify cracks with machine learning, all at 1:1 scale

Collaborative design: Revit, Rhino & SketchUp models

Hilmar Gunnarsson and Johan Hanegraaf, Arkio

From our first NXT BLD to our fifth, we have watched Hanegraaf’s ‘VR design for architects’ concept go from an idea to a shipping product, Arkio. This year, the Arkio team modelled the QEII Conference Centre and the Parliament building area – the location of NXT BLD – and demonstrated the breadth of Arkio’s modelling and collaborative capabilities, together with links to working with Revit and Sketchup.

At one point, they invited the whole audience to join them in a massive, live, collaborative session using their phones!

Autonomous robots in construction

David Burczyk, Trimble and Brian Ringley, Boston Dynamics

How does robot autonomy work on a construction site, a space which changes every day and is unpredictable? The heads of construction from Trimble and Boston Dynamics look at the benefit of flexible autonomy while performing high resolution data capture. Burczyk and Ringley also explore what can be done with robotic data capture, now it can be automated and carried out much more regularly. Trimble extends this concept to show how the data could be used in real time for in-field analysis, such as monitoring slab pours and comparing the as built vs the constructed.

Spot for the AEC industry

Martha Tsigkari and team, Foster + Partners Applied Research and Development (ARD) Group

The ARD group at Foster +Partners is legendary in the fields of complex geometry, AI, VR/AR, performance simulation and IoT. This year we were lucky to have four of the team onstage to talk in detail about their research into digital twins and the use of robots in construction. Foster + Partners sees benefits in not only creating construction twins, but also beyond in operational twins, seeing how buildings are used, monitoring environmental conditions, as well as energy usage. These experiments were carried out on its own campus, as well as on actual active projects

The future of collaboration through Open Source

Dimitrie Stefanescu & Matteo Cominetti, Speckle

Speckle is an open source enabling ecosystem, designed to remove the bottlenecks created by today’s federated and proprietary constrained data environments. We need a more flexible solution to store this data, says Stefanescu and Cominetti, and Speckle delivers an object-based, open source, interoperability platform designed to bypass the current bottlenecks. It’s a rare initiative in this industry that is almost wholly altruistic.

The clamour for openness is growing and many are wondering if having a single BIM model was such a good idea in the first place. Stefanescu summed it up in one sentence: ‘single source of truth is a fallacy, we don’t want one ‘God like’ model’.

Industrialised Construction – transformation through data for manufacture and assembly

Amy Marks, Autodesk

Out of all of the traditional CAD firms, Autodesk is the most vocal about developing a strategy for its customers to cross the chasm between architectural design and digital fabrication. Marks has joined Autodesk after running a successful industrialised construction firm and is looking to educate and engage the industry as an evangelist. She acknowledges that change is hard but this has to happen as the fabrication needs to be considered at the point of design. Her strategy is to design using a kit of parts, to productise the physical and the digital and reduce the production of one-off parts.

The next generation: generative design in practice

Emily Scoones, Ramboll

Ramboll has been looking at how it can take its in-house generative design knowledge and apply it at a more traditional scale, to create tools for designers to enable them to design with competing constraints and iterate faster. As engineers, Scoones points out that, all too often in the existing process they come to a project at a late stage and point out problems.

The company is keen to share its knowledge earlier to avoid ‘well documented designs’ that are problematic. SiteSolve is a productised generative design tool from Ramboll which looks at feasibility for residential massing, looking at competing variables – roads, target mixes, floor heights, topology etc. using built-in engineering knowledge and rules to define overall design options.

The future of architecture: design & code across realities

Andreea Ion Cojocaru, Numena

Numena is a start-up of ‘coding architects’, which is developing a new VR / AR design tool, based on Unity, for architectural experimentation. One of the fundamental features is the system’s ability to display, for the user, 1:1 interaction with the design model, while including traditional scaled digital documents, merging plan and model.

Part of the research asks clients to ‘design their own buildings’ using the VR system, as they respond to the volume and light in the model, which is impossible to realise from 2D plans. This all feeds back into the BIM system.

Twinning it to 11

Robert Jamieson, AMD

AMD Threadripper Pro multi-core processors launched in 2020 and were quickly established as a price / performance challenger to the mighty Intel, especially in high-compute throughput use cases, such as rendering, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and simulation which can make use of the processor’s 64 cores.

The future of processing is more cores and software companies are redeveloping popular tools to access this power, with more cores rumoured to be coming in the next generation.

Research in practice

Francis Aish and Martha Tsigkari, Foster + Partners

Two of the industry’s applied computational giants, Aish and Tsigkari, highlight some of their research work, starting with famous work done on ‘The Gherkin’, from a time when there was no Rhino / Grasshopper, to today, where they are dealing with buildings that require performance-driven complexity over a thousand times greater than the problems they were solving in the 1990s. With every project comes new challenges, “Francis, can you scan the desert?” asked a senior partner! The challenge was to capture the ripples of the sand to be used in the building design, which had to be modular, appear random, interchangeable and be low cost! Well worth a watch, as the pair also talk about Omniverse, machine learning, AR, simulation and in-house developments.

Delivering real-time experiences

Rob Harrison, Epic Games and Murray Levinson, Squire & Partners

A year in to using Twinmotion, Levinson gives an insight as to how Squire and Partners has been using the real-time viz technology in its master planning and commercial, large scale residential and hotel work. The firm employs 16 people in its in-house CGI team and has recently moved from mainly making stills to producing high-end moving animation and VR for projects, as the competition raises the bar.

Levinson nails the current zeitgeist, “Design has become a massive shared event, where you have to talk to everyone.

Scaling remote & hybrid workforces without compromising productivity

Mike Leach, Lenovo

Given the last two years, it was no surprise that our annual update from Lenovo’s workstation expert focused on the latest in ‘work-from-anywhere’ solutions, where performance is key but so is security given the geographically stretched nature of company networks. TGX is a software layer that is installed on Lenovo workstations which means you can connect to any machine, any user, anywhere at anytime, leveraging Nvidia RTX power that firms have perhaps had to leave in an office. Also mentioned is CloudXR which provides VR and AR wirelessly across mixed devices.

An architect in the Metaverse: social VR, NFTs, and new opportunities

Alex Coulombe, Agile Lens

In his talk at NXT BLD Virtual in 2020, Coulombe looked at the mapping of the virtual to the real, having a real mock-up that can be tested with subjects in VR. This year he talked about designing virtual spaces that don’t exist and will never be built, “I guess it’s called ‘the metaverse’”. Alex explored: What is virtual architecture? What is the psychology of virtual architecture? The unique affordances of virtual spaces, how art, film and games can inspire virtual architecture and with the rise of NFTs the commercial aspects of VR architecture. Mind blowing stuff.

Nvidia Omniverse, an open Platform

George Matos, Nvidia

Mentioned multiple times by firms throughout the day, Nvidia Omniverse is the passion and baby of Matos. The platform enables users in different applications, in different geographic locations to be able to share geometry and ‘scene’ information between core AEC tools with active, live synchronisation, all while powered by Nvidia’s cloud GPUs. It’s a game changer in collaboration and underpinned by Pixar’s USD file format. Matos explains that in our locked-in, siloed AEC workflows, Omniverse breaks down the boundaries and connects the 3D data sets from design teams and multi-disciplinary participants with the power virtual super-computer. This is a great in-depth talk on everything Omniverse.

Virtual collaboration and visualisation in AEC

Aleksander Nyquist Langmyhr, Varjo

One of the most impressive VR headsets we have seen in the last two years comes from Finland. The headset was specifically clever in the way it uses a bionic display and tracks the eyes of the user to provide ‘human eye’ resolution at the point of focus.

At NXT BLD Varjo launched a new lower cost headset, the Varjo Aero and TeleportVR  – a metaverse which allows users to ‘drag and drop’ AEC models into their software for collaborative VR review, which it then uploads it to the cloud for sharing. It can also link to desktop apps such as Revit. The system supports multiple manufacturers’ headsets, not just those from Varjo.

The post The future has arrived: NXT BLD on-demand appeared first on AEC Magazine.

NXT BLD is AEC Magazine’s annual event where we examine the disruptive technologies coming to the architecture and construction space. We look beyond today’s BIM adoption challenges to smarter, intelligent digital workflows, from concept through fabrication to operation.

Last year, the pandemic forced us to go virtual but the incredible vaccine roll-out means NXT BLD 2021 will now take place at the prestigious QEII Centre in London on 9 November 2021 and we can’t wait to meet you all again in person.

The last eighteen months are already starting to feel like a dystopian VR dream, being confined to our homes for so long and only able to connect virtually.

It was certainly the year in which the Internet rescued the AEC industry, with various cloud platforms enabling projects to keep going, despite working together, apart.

This experience has changed attitudes to where we work, how we collaborate and how we make our IT backbones more resilient. We will be addressing this subject within the conference with our partner, Lenovo, and others.

In terms of core AEC technologies, we have an inspiring roster of speakers for our two conference tracks, covering a wide range of hot topics — off-site construction, computational design, collaboration tools, robots and construction, VR, mixed reality, digital twins, extremely high-resolution reality capture (photogrammetry) and the latest in powerful workstations. Each talk include an audience Q&A. See below for some of the highlights.

Meanwhile, here’s some more information and details of our enhanced COVID safety procedures

Exclusive 2-for-1 ticket offer for AEC Magazine readers

For readers of AEC Magazine, we are offering a strictly limited number of tickets on a special 2-for-1 offer.

Simply use the promotional code 241AEC and you can pick up a pair of tickets for £69.

Tickets include full access to the conference and exhibition, refreshments, lunch and drinks at the networking reception. When they’re gone, they’re gone!

Greg Schleusner

Principal / director of design technology, HOK

In this unmissable presentation, Greg Schleusner, director of design technology and innovation at HOK will explore the necessity and opportunities for architecture and engineering practices to work together to solve the challenges facing our industry.

Foster + Partners applied research and development (ARD) group

The in-house Applied Research and Development team (ARD) at Foster + Partners is legendary. Comprising, architects and engineers who can program, the multi-disciplinary team are tasked with solving complex design problems, developing tools for teams, as well as evaluating the latest hardware and software.

NXT BLD will feature two talks from ARD. The first, on its real-world evaluation of using robots in construction. The team (pictured right with Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot) will relay the positive and negative findings of their experiments with automation.

For the second talk, Martha Tsigkari and Francis Aish will highlight some of the research projects the team has undertaken to resolve complex design issues. ARD’s work covers: computational design, performance analysis, optimisation, fabrication, AR/VR, machine learning, and real-time simulation.

Both talks are not to be missed.

The NASA control room for construction

Dr. Marzia Bolpagni // MACE
How can NASA control projects in real time and predict events, while in construction we are struggling? Is it possible to create a control room for our sector? In this presentation Marzia will present the work that Mace has been leading together with other industry and academic partners to solve such a challenge. The work aims to help UK construction be more efficient and proactive rather than reactive with a scalable and repeatable plug-and play construction management and reporting platform known as the AEC Production Control Room.

Marzia works as Head of BIM International at Mace where she develops and implements digital construction solutions for public and private international clients in five international hubs. She holds a PhD in ICT and Smart Construction and she is passionate about filling the gap between industry and academia.

Autonomous robots in construction

David Burczyk, Trimble

Robots in construction have the potential to enhance field-oriented workflows, reduce the amount of rework, and facilitate on-site tasks. Utilising robots for routine tasks in hazardous environments such as construction sites can improve safety, efficiency, and data capture consistency.

Trimble and Boston Dynamics announced an exclusive alliance agreement for Trimble to be the sole integration partner for construction data collection technologies, including 3D laser scanning, GNSS, and robotic total stations with Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot. With a focus on building construction and civil construction workflows, Trimble and Boston Dynamics will introduce new products and services to advance the use of robotics in the construction industry.

Design and code across realities

Andreea Ion Cojocaru, Numena

Numena, a design and software development company with a pioneering approach to the practice of architecture, comprises coding architects that both design and develop. The company works on spatial experiences and interactions across multiple dimensions and modalities.

Projects range from custom VR and AR applications, to virtual architecture, to physical architecture. Numena XR, a VR design tool at the heart of the company’s workflow was born out of its belief that architects should also design and code their own tools. Cojocaru will do a live demo and argue for two major propositions VR has to offer beyond visualisation.

Amy Marks

VP of industrialised  construction strategy, Autodesk

Amy Marks will be talking about integrating with off-site construction and prefabrication, together with sharing her industry experience at XSite Modular.

Remote inspections with Mixed Reality

Greg Demchak, Bentley

Very high resolution photogrammetry is bringing Digital Twins to life, with exceptional detail and accuracy. Greg Demchak, director of Bentley Systems’s digital innovation lab, looks at the latest mixed reality technology to aid construction planning and virtualised inspections.

An Architect in the Metaverse:

social VR, NFTs, and new opportunities

Alex Coulombe of Agile Lens will discuss how the rapidly evolving landscape of emerging tech has presented myriad opportunities for architects to apply their skillsets to the digital realm. What happens when a virtual space needs to provide the same functions as a real one for hundreds of people?

Dimitrie Stefanescu, Speckle Systems

A shared mission, a common greater good, collaboration, and passion are key ingredients of Open Source. In this presentation, Dimitrie will untangle what it means for the AEC industry, and how Speckle is attempting to transform the industry with those values in mind.

Nvidia Omniverse, an open Platform

George Matos, Nvidia

Nvidia Omniverse is an open platform built for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation. Nvidia’s George Matos will explain how the platform allows teams to piece together many different tools, in an open and extensible way to focus on what matters most.

Scaling remote & hybrid workforces

Mike Leach, Lenovo

With a major shift to hybrid working, it is important to understand how technology can streamline new & key business processes. How do you build on existing IT infrastructure, how do you better manage a growing hybrid workforce and can you still leverage immersive technologies whilst working remotely?

David Weir McCall, Epic Games

David will explore how real-time technology is transforming the AEC industry, enabling faster, more iterative design solutions and bridging the gap between an idea and reality. The boundaries and output of the traditional architectural deliverable is evolving, giving new life to your digital models after design.

Robert Jamieson, AMD

How the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors, is the platform of choice for demanding AEC professionals. By combining high CPU clock speed and industry leading core density, Threadripper Pro processors deliver the full spectrum of compute capability.

Rob Harrison, Epic Games

Rob is connected to many of the leading architects and engineering teams, as well as a host of specialist firms that deliver real-time experiences, such as digital twins and immersive collaboration environments. At NXT BLD Rob will be joined on stage by one of these customers to explore their use case in detail.

Johan Hanegraaf, Arkio

Regular NXT BLD visitors will be familiar with Johan Hanegraaf, the Dutch architect who presented a concept of what an architectural virtual reality design system would look like, at the first NXT BLD. This year his prototype turned into a product and Arkio has become so much more.

The post NXT BLD 2021 – London, 9 November appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Nonica has released NonicaTab PRO, an extended version of its free Revit add-on that allows users to customise a Revit with a toolbar to run Dynamo scripts, such as those designed to automate repetitive tasks.

The toolbar can be customised with three profiles (Default, Beta, and Gamma) of 12 buttons each, which can be easily switched between at runtime.

The PRO version also allows users to import and export NonicaTab PRO toolbars and share them easily via a (.nonica) file.

When toolbars are exported, NonicaTab PRO automatically detects all the installed Dynamo packages required to run the scripts and they will be imported together with the toolbar. Users only need to ensure that they are created or resaved in a Dynamo version later than v2.3.

The PRO release also includes Input Detector, which allows NonicaTab PRO to ask for input values before executing a Dynamo script. Nonica has compiled more than 40 input nodes to make customisation easier.

The software also has some features for those that prefer to set up their own icons and scripts.

‘Refresh All’ updates all Dynamo scripts in the NonicaTab buttons in one click. All the user needs to do is to keep the modified Dynamo script in the same location with the same name as the selected button.

‘Icons’ allows the user to select any JPG or PNG image of any size and it will automatically be converted and included in the NonicaTab button. Extra set of icons of different colours are also included.

NonicaTab PRO runs Dynamo in the background and pops up any input window such as Data Shapes package input nodes. The software notifies in real time if the script was run successfully or with errors or warnings. Users can also set Dynamo scripts to run from keyboard shortcuts.

NonicaTab PRO is available from the Autodesk App Store. Prices start at $5 per month.

The software is developed by Autodesk Authorized Developer Nonica, a team of architects turned Revit programmers with expertise in Revit APIs and c# programming.

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NXT BLD (Next Build) is AEC Magazine’s annual one day conference where we exam ine the disruptive technolo gies coming to the architecture and construction space. We look beyond today’s BIM adoption challenges to smarter, intelligent digital workflows, from concept through fabrication to operation. Last year, the pandemic forced us to go online in October but the incredible vaccine roll-out promises to bring back a sense of normality by the summer, with social distancing measures abating. Our annual regular date in June is just a little too early to benefit from all of this, so NXT BLD 2021 will take place at the prestigious QEII Centre in London on 9 November 2021 and we can’t wait to see you all in person.

As the UK continues to open up, the last fifteen months is already starting to feel like a dystopian VR dream, being confined to our homes for so long and only able to connect through digital media. It was certainly the year in which the Internet rescued the AEC industry, with various cloud platforms enabling projects to keep going despite working together, apart. How this experience will change attitudes to where we work, collaborate and how we change our IT backbones to be more resilient, will be an important trend to monitor. We will be addressing this subject within the conference with our partner, Lenovo, and others.

In terms of core AEC technologies, we are already building a roster of speakers for our two conference tracks, covering a wide range of hot topics — off-site construction, computational design, collaboration tools, robots and construction, VR/ AR, digital twins, extremely high-resolution reality capture (photogrammetry) and the latest in powerful workstations. Each talk will have time for an audience Q&A.

Amy Marks, Autodesk VP of Industrialised Construction Strategy and Evangelism, will be talking about integrating with off-site construction and prefabrication, together with sharing her industry experience at XSite Modular.

Greg Schleusner, director of design technology and innovation at HOK will explore the challenges that the current generation design tools present and how collaboration within the industry could help firms regain control of the design process, giving more time for designing.

Greg Demchak, director of Bentley Systems’ Digital Innovation Lab, will speak about research being done on extremely high-resolution, high accuracy, photogrammetry for digital twins and AI/ ML (Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning) analysis, as well as using digital twin data in augmented reality.

Paul Jefferies, director computational design lead at Ramboll will talk on the inhouse development of applications such as generative design platform SiteSolve, for site optimisation, financial appraisal and engineering insight.

Alex Coulombe, co-founder of Agile Lens rejoins us this year to look at developments in VR/AR. His talk at 2020’s virtual event was superb, on how VR tools have progressed so dramatically in capability throughout the lifecycle of his projects.

Regular NXT BLD visitors will be familiar with Johan Hanegraaf, the Dutch architect who presented a concept of what an architectural VR design system would look like, at the first NXT BLD. This year, his prototype becomes a product. Arkio has become so much more and we will have Johan and Hilmar Gunnarsson on hand to hold live collaborative VR demos and answer your questions.

More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. Full details here. We are really looking forward to breaking out of our ‘bubbles’ and seeing you all on 9 November 2021 at the QEII Centre, London. While we are not discounting that there may be further bumps in our journey out of lockdown, we will keep a close eye on the situation and, of course, will take any steps necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.

Early bird tickets

We are currently offering a limited number of early bird tickets for £49. The price includes full access to the conference and exhibition, refreshments, lunch and drinks at the networking reception. Early bird tickets will be available until 19 July. After this date full price tickets will be available for £69. Book now.

Get a taste of NXT BLD

All 18 presentations and Q&As from our 2020 virtual event are available to view on-demand here.

These include the Autodesk Open Letter Group, Elif Erdine (the Architectural Association (AA)), Elena Cassini + Ferdinand Garcia Blanco (Roboticore), Nate Miller (Proving Ground), Alexander Türk (Aeditive), Julie Dorsay (Mental Canvas), Bruce Bell (Facit Homes), Mark Taylor (BAM), Tal Friedman (Foldstruct), Mollie Claypool (The Bartlett), Mike Katz (AMD), Johan Hanegraaf + Hilmar Gunnarsson (Arkio), Chris Ruffo (Lenovo), Mike Leach (Lenovo), Rob Jamieson (AMD), Andrew Rink (Nvidia), Scott Ruppert (Lenovo), Ken Pimental (Epic Games) and Alex Coulombe (Agile Lens).

In fact, all presentations from NXT BLD 2017-2020 can be viewed on-demand here.

The post NXT BLD 2021 preview appeared first on AEC Magazine.

When we first moved from drawing boards to desktop PCs running CAD software, it wasn’t long before the creation of lines, circles and arcs failed to give us additional productivity benefits.

The beauty of being digitised in a computer meant that automation and higher levels of industry knowledge could be captured and used in vertical applications.

Software developers added support for programming languages (e.g. Autodesk with LISP) and created Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for professional developers to build expert systems on top of their drawing tools.

This eventually led to industry-specific software firms, creating dedicated vertical applications, designed for very specific professions – architecture, structural, civil, CAFM etc.

Advanced users utilised the programming extensions to automate repetitive tasks and integrate with external programs such as spreadsheets. Some firms completely tailored their CAD systems to their usage.

The ability to adapt and augment has been a core part of our design tools for some time.

The move over the last 20 years to 3D modelling/BIM tools has further digitised the design process, pushing beyond pure symbology and ‘dumb’ drawings, capturing 3D geometry and detailed building information.

These systems, namely ArchiCAD, Revit, Vectorworks, BricsCAD BIM etc. still include programming languages for end-user extensibility as well as APIs, spawning a range of modern third-party developers, like Enscape, Testfit, Strucsoft etc. keen to add additional functionality.

For end users, computational design tools like Bentley Systems GenerativeComponents, McNeel Rhino Grasshopper and Autodesk Dynamo have provided deeper levels of automation, handling geometric definition complexity. The net result of this has been a generation of designers acquiring scripting and programming knowledge, together with a realisation that design requires data flow through multiple software packages.

With this current incarnation of AEC design tools and user skill sets, something is different. In the last few years, I’ve noticed an increasing number of AEC firms develop ambitious in-house applications, workflow connectors, AI, simulation and specific tools for project teams.

While investing in creating in-house tools might not be a new thing, the fact that many of the firms are branding and marketing their in-house code as a potential differentiator, indicates an increased level of programming competence.

The true scale of this trend hit me in the face when Gensler sent a press release last summer about ‘Blox’, an algorithm-powered design visualisation and computational tool.

It came with its own logo and branding and slick interface. It looked like something you could buy from a reseller and may well be a tool that many architects would like. However, it was a proprietary technology that was designed for its inhouse teams, as part of the firm’s inFORM suite of tools to boost internal design capability.

This was a new level of workflow productisation for Gensler, which was clearly making a statement to the market. AEC firms don’t just design and construct buildings; they also write their own code and build their own bespoke BIM software.

Gensler has invested in technology to join up its digital thread, starting from the client brief to concept, all the way through to completion. The firm has its own in-house programming resources, together with strategic investments in small application developers to augment its own product stack.

The trend for AEC firms to develop software is now becoming a lot more common. In addition to Gensler Blox, Bryden Wood has launched PRiSM for modular development, Lendlease has developed Podium, a ‘property lifecycle platform’ for planning, financial, performance management of buildings.

Similarly, Space Architects has developed TwinView for Digital Twin management and Ramboll has SiteSolve, a computational design tool for building analysis at the early-stage of the decision making process that is capable of iterative massing.

On top of all this we also have consultants and resellers developing and selling tools which they have created in the past for clients to solve specific problems. Proving Ground, Thornton Tomasetti, Oasys (Arup) to name but a few.

Bespoke BIM software – the origins

Of course, in-house development is nothing new. Having an expert technical team to help bring impossible architecture to reality has been done by a select number of firms.

Probably the most famous architect in this area is Frank Gehry. Before using CAD, Gehry had trouble winning projects because contractors could never fully understand his buildings from the drawings and so would quote extremely high prices.

He moved to deploying Dassault Systèmes Catia in-house, an advanced CAD tool traditionally used by automotive and aerospace firms, then built a team of experts who digitised all of his paper models and eventually got their own brand (Gehry Technologies – under Jim Glyph).

By sending 3D models to his contractors, quotes came down and his buildings became less financially onerous and risky to build. Eventually Gehry Technologies was sold to Trimble and to this day many instances where Catia can be found in AEC, have ex- Gehry Technologies employees involved.

In the UK in the 1980s, YRM and Richard Rogers were early into 3D modelling. They used products like Sonata and RUCAPS (Really Universal Computer Aided Production System) and were coding to complete designs. Similarly, ARUPs, which eventually set up Oasys specifically to develop applications for internal and external markets.

In 1998 Foster + Partners set up a Special Modelling Group (SMG) under Hugh Whitehead, which similarly took on the hard problems of geometry definition and created bespoke tools for the designers to experiment and play with complex geometry.

Foster + Partners has also set up the ARD – Applied Research + Development Group, headed up by Francis Aish. While most of the developments which the dedicated team creates remain in-house secrets, some do get an occasional airing, such as Sandbox I/O, a real-time conceptual design evaluation tool, written on top of Unity (see this AEC Magazine article to learn more).

Lego vs geometry definition

The examples of Fosters and Gehry could easily be seen as the exceptions to the rule vs the workflows and toolsets which most design firms use. The need for computational tools designed by aerospace engineers was certainly driven by the need to express the extreme geometric vocabulary for which these signature architecture firms are famous.

However, this isn’t the end of the story, as both practices reach out to work with contractors who are digitally fabricating building components, connecting their designs with fabrication machines. This is the future of our AEC world and digital fabrication will liberate us from the risks of non-rectilinear forms.

Today’s BIM tools mainly tend to be based on components; the Lego approach to modelling and the conventional approach to building. The software is also focused on the conventional method of collaboration – 2D drawings.

While useful in some circumstances, and targeted for documentation, they are not ideal for design exploration, especially conceptual. This appears to be a key area where we are seeing a lot of in-house development from AEC firms trying to fill their digital voids.

The other issue with BIM software is that as designs progress, the size of the models increases, and the performance of the system is impacted. While software vendors have typically wanted customers to stay within the BIM application for the whole workflow, this is not an ideal environment to run CPU-heavy design evaluation tools, such as analysis or BIM coordination, where federated data needs to be collated and shared to resolve issues.

Gameification

One of the biggest changes to the application development landscape has been the arrival of the game engine tools, Unreal and Unity. These mature, extensible engines are optimised for 3D performance and provide firms with powerful development platforms.

Data flows between BIM tools and these game engines have vastly improved in the last few years and are now proving popular for geometry-based design development.

Unreal, for instance, is capable of displaying an entire city in real time and the developer of the engine, Epic Games, has clients such as HOK, KPF, Foster + Partners, and ZHD all developing design and collaboration tools on top. Rumour has it that ZHD is developing a configuration tool for modular buildings.

Ramboll

Paul Jeffries is computational design lead at Ramboll and is responsible for the SiteSolve development.

I asked him how Ramboll came to develop its own generative conceptual tool. He replied, “A few years ago, Ramboll set up around this process called the ‘Innovation Accelerator’, for different teams across Ramboll to pitch for funding, to build a business case to get funding. Three different projects came out of that, one of those was SiteSolve. We had a budget to self-develop the application and it gave us enough resource for a dedicated full-time team.

“Primarily we are using SiteSolve as an internal facing tool, but we are also selling it externally as well to our client base. We’re working out what best fits each client. Some clients are knowledgeable enough to just take the software and run it themselves, while others want us to use the software and steer it for them.

“We’ve been using Unity for the visualisation aspects of it. The core itself is our own kind of custom C# engine which is doing all the calculations. We have a link into Grasshopper and Rhino.”

Traditionally, internally developed tools lack the finesse of a proper interface and documentation. This can be fine for internal use, where the developers are on call to assist anyone who runs into trouble. However, selling software commercially requires a whole new level of quality assurance, documentation, training and interface.

For SiteSolve Jeffries explained, “Interface wise, we’ve gone further than we would have ever gone if we weren’t going to sell it. However, I think we’ve also found that actually doing UI and documentation is quite important from an internal uptake point of view. You save time on training, if you’d just built a better interface in the first place.”

Billable hours

In my discussions on coding with IT directors in AEC firms, the one term that kept popping up like a bad penny was ‘billable hours’.

Only a handful of firms have dedicated programming resources, or an architect or engineer dedicated to developing software. The key problem was the mindset of managers, which strictly adhered to the concept of allocating project billable hours to employees.

Many firms could not see through this traditional resource allocation methodology when it came to hiring programmers to develop its own tools.

In truth, firms that cannot get past that old way of thinking are not really aware of how important digital workflows have become, or how new entrepreneurial business models and revenue streams can be associated to management and use of the data they create.

Talking with Nate Miller, CEO of Proving Ground, he commented, “It’s interesting to think about an architecture firm, trying to carve out that budget and time to develop their own solutions. Looking for billable hours amidst the kind of significant investment that would go into building a platform, or any kind of script that works reliably, is significant.

“The business model of architecture and engineers, the construction industry is, in some ways, incompatible with the business model of running a software company. And maybe there is a clue in there, that in terms of if an architecture company wants to get into this space, does it need to change how it’s going to do business?

“When you get into the cycle of project work, you’re talking about billable hours and the need to get the job out the door, to go onto the next job. Buildings are treated as one off service-oriented outputs but when you’re developing a piece of software, it’s all about how you reinvest into that product. You make it once and then figure out a way to make money, sell licences or, if internal, maybe charge it back to a project.”

Newcastle’s own BIM supremo, Rob Charlton of Space Group, is most certainly a man who can see opportunities and is willing to change business models.

While predominantly an architecture firm, Charlton clearly understood the potential for BIM and software development, diversifying Space Architecture into BIM component development (bimstore), BIM Technologies (consulting) and more recently TwinView).

This latter venture is a really smart play for those architects that want to provide Digital Twins to their clients. As an architecture firm, Charlton recognised the value of the BIM data to his clients, the ongoing lifecycle of that and the fact there was downstream income.

TwinView was developed to easily repurpose that data and hand it on as a post design service. It is still possible to be an architecture firm, while at the same time being a software developer and create tools that benefit your own business as well as productising and commercially marketing those tools to others.

Futures

I have previously stated, many times, that the AEC industry is currently at the end of one generation of BIM tools and awaiting the next. Listening to the software developers, it’s all going to be on the cloud.

It’s worth highlighting Autodesk’s approach to development with its Forge platform. Historically if you wanted to build an application, a developer would either have to write a plug-in for the desktop application, or license a version (called OEM) to build on top of, to sell a complete turnkey application.

Over the last five years, Autodesk has been creating cloud components of all its core functionality. This means that a developer could ‘call’ Autodesk’s DWG engine, 3D viewing tool, cost management or document management engine on the cloud and wire them into their own applications.

Autodesk doesn’t just see developers using Forge but also its customers to develop their own cloud-based solutions by mixing and matching applications with Forge functionality to make project desktops or bespoke solutions. The idea of what an ‘application’ is capable of, is going to get a lot more fluid.

Conclusion

There is undoubtedly a reassessment going on inside of mature AEC firms in their approach to digital tools. Those that want to fully digitise their processes from conceptual to life-cycle and can’t find off-the-shelf solutions, are undaunted at developing bespoke BIM software themselves.

The barrier to entry in software development in the AEC space has been dramatically lowered, with the availability of low-cost, feature rich, platforms like SketchUp, Unreal, Unity, Blender, Forge, Rhino.Inside and Nvidia Omniverse. All built for speed and the ability to display vast amounts of data.

This app could be using internal resources, external consultants, or making strategic investments in up-and-coming software developers. While predominantly for internal usage, some are exploring productisation and even selling. There’s even the possibility of teaming up with enterprise investment funds or venture capital to develop with a commercial mindset from the start.

The one thing worth pointing out, is that there is a lot of reinventing the wheel going on, especially in conceptual design. Blox and SiteSolve are all playing in the same area as Spacemaker. Al (Autodesk), Hypar, Digital Blue Foam etc.

Most firms face similar challenges. Those that are capable of developing inhouse solutions might not realise other firms have also done this. If the trend to embrace branding, marketing and productisation of internal developments continues, there may be greater clarity as to who has developed what. There would surely be a potential to swap and share tools and save a lot of duplicated effort.

My last thoughts on this, concern the attitudes of AEC firms to software developers. Many do not want to be beholden to software firms which are attempting to own the process and increase prices. As being both the client and the consumer of the software development, who better to derive the feature set than the customer?

Custom tools from AEC firms

Foster + Partners Sandbox I/O

Built on top of Unity, Foster + Partners developed a conceptual design environment, to model, explore, simulate and analyse designs against a range of environmental conditions on desktop, iPad and in VR (pictured left). Only available within Foster + Partners.

Gensler Blox

Blox develops massing designs based on programmatic designations at the master plan scale. It provides preliminary budget estimates for construction, parking, and other project elements. It checks the building envelope, allows infinite usage mixes, and can incorporate live data. This can all be compared against, or driven by, the client’s brief. It’s only available to Gensler’s own design team.

Ramboll SiteSolve

SiteSolve is an algorithmic tool which can be used to dynamically model, manipulate and explore development sites, allowing project teams to collaborate, explore and visualise iterative design options.

The software is used internally at Ramboll and is also available for purchase.

Twinview

Developed by Space Group, Twinview is a cloud-based digital twin platform, for computer aided facilities management, with a dashboard for live sensors. It was developed by architects for both their own use and as a commercial product.

Bryden Wood PRiSM

Funded by the Mayor of London, Bryden Wood designed a modular construction analysis tool for developers. Based on various configurations and layouts, the Unity-based software provides property developers with a guide as to the best modular construction methods. It is free to download.

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