April 2013

Anything You can Do, I can Do Better: taking materials from SketchUp to ArchiCAD

April 17, 2013

I expect to have dozens of people argue against that title. But I sure bet it caught your attention. The real point is that most architectural software has something to teach us about our own preferred program. The examples are endless. But today I want to focus on one program in particular: SketchUp. SketchUp models, the traditional variety of them, have this beautiful balance of realism and abstraction. They sit

Changing Course and an Incredible New Album

April 16, 2013

My daughters and I were driving to Costco on a recent weekend. Since it was a Saturday afternoon I had the radio tuned to MPR (Minnesota Public Radio). I heard an interview with Kacey Musgraves. I guess she’s kind of a big deal right now with a new album, some country music award nominations, and some songs on some show or another (Nashville?). I’d never heard of her. But her

A great interview and some thoughts about Autodesk

April 12, 2013

When I was writing yesterday’s post, which asked the question “Do you love your BIM software too much?“, I had in the back of my mind an article I recently read. But I couldn’t find it. Which is for the best because that post took a turn in a different direction. Well I found the article. If you haven’t already read this, take a moment and read a great interview

Do you love your BIM software too much?

April 11, 2013

The recent announcement of Google killing Google Reader has me thinking about dead software, over specialization, and the dependence on software companies. My readers who use Autodesk products might feel a little uncomfortable for a moment… are you too dependent on the whims of a mega-corporation that is clearly less interested in architects than they were when their flagship product was AutoCAD? Click on that link and count the number

Skill vs Power: Learning BIM

April 9, 2013

If you have six minutes, please do yourself a favor and watch this video. But instead of thinking about video games, think about BIM adoption in firms. Specifically think about people learning ArchiCAD, Revit, or one of the other BIM authoring tools out there. Here’s the best analogy from the video, or an approximation at least. If you’re under 40, you’ve probably played Street Fighter II. Or something very similar.

Revit 2014, the Great Convergence, and impatience until June

April 7, 2013

So Revit 2014… have we all had time to digest yet? Here’s a great rundown of some of the highlights of Revit 2014 from David Light, a Revit Pro. Laszlo Nagy, one of the moderators over at ArchiCAD-Talk, gives some interesting perspective on Revit 2014 as it relates to ArchiCAD. You can read his full comments and the related thread here. Below are main points: Project Browser can have tabs:

Guest Blogger Kata Danis: Reinforcement plans in ArchiCAD

April 4, 2013

ArchiCAD is considered to be a modeling program for architects only. We at Eptar Ltd. however do not think that is the case. We believe that ArchiCAD can be made capable of handling not only architects’ but other designers’ preferences as well. The [eptar] Reinforcement solution was developed to make sure that architects and structural engineers can work together in ArchiCAD on the same BIM model. While developing the solution

Nemetschek introduces new platform for the building industry: bim+

April 2, 2013

This news isn’t super new, but it is super interesting. How did we all miss this? And why isn’t Nemetschek pushing this harder… perhaps across all their platforms and voices (Graphisoft… cough, cough). Take a look at the BIM+ site here. It’s now open for Beta. Here’s a snippet from the official press release and an intro video… Munich, 14. January 2013 – bim+ is an open platform and a

BIM Maturity Survey from Purdue University

April 1, 2013

There are a lot of people out there researching BIM, BIM implementation, BIM maturity, etc. I’d say I fill out three or four of these surveys a month. As long as I have the time, I’m always happy to provide my data points. Since BIM is so much about Information Management, it feels really good to see people researching the whole movement, to see people analyzing what we do everyday.