AIA 2004 National Convention and Expo

In This Issue:

• Show Highlights
• News from the Expo Floor

If the attendance at the annual AIA National Convention can be regarded as a barometer of the economic health of the AEC industry, the current prognosis looks extremely positive. The estimated attendance at the 2004 Convention held last week in Chicago was over 22,000, a record-breaking number for this event. Compare this to the attendance numbers of past conventions: 18,000 for the 2003 event in San Diego, 15,000 for the 2002 event in Charlotte, and 16,500 for the 2001 event in Denver. The leap was staggering and beat the best expectations of the organizers—their original estimate was 18,000! The McCormick Place in Chicago, where the convention was held, was packed at all times, and the booths on the Expo floor were located so close together that it was hard to get a demo of a product without the background noise of several competing product demos. The exhibitors weren't complaining, of course, and were extremely elated by the unexpected crowds that kept them on their toes throughout the show.

In this issue of the AECbytes newsletter, I will briefly describe the highlights of the Convention from a technology perspective and provide an overview of the new releases of existing products that were unveiled at the show. In the next issue, I will describe the new products that made their debut on the Expo floor this year. Detailed reviews of some of these products will also soon follow in the AECbytes Product Review series.

For past reports on AIA national conventions, please see Issues 51, 52, 75, 76, and 77 of my Cadence AEC Tech Newsletter.

Show Highlights

While the official theme of this year's convention was "Learn, Celebrate, Dream"—which is somewhat generic rather than focused on any specific topic—what I saw very much in evidence at the convention was an emphasis on green buildings and sustainable architecture. A large part of this can be credited to the fact that the venue of the convention was Chicago, whose mayor, Richard M. Daley, has earned a reputation for strongly pushing the concept of green buildings in the city's architectural landscape. The Mayor strongly emphasized this concept in his speech during the opening general session. The next day, the point was reiterated in a brief address by the Mayor of Honolulu, Jeremy Harris, who made an impassioned plea to architects to design living environments that use renewable energy and are less wasteful of the earth's increasingly scarce resources. With gas prices at such a high these days, the call for energy-efficient buildings could scarcely have failed to hit home for most of the attendees.

In addition to green/sustainable design, other issues that were explored in the general sessions and seminars were the design of livable communities, historic preservation, and security and design trends. Technology was surprisingly conspicuous by its absence—sessions focused on the use of technology were few and far between. I hardly heard the term building information modeling (BIM), which had been the main focus of the discussions at the AIA Technology in Architectural Practice conference last October (see Cadence AEC Tech News #108). I was also surprised to find no representation from the IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability), which traditionally demonstrates the growing capabilities of the IFC building model in allowing diverse multi-disciplinary applications to interoperate. This means that either technology is no longer seen as a critical issue, or that it is so much a part of the design process and professional practice that it does not need to be extensively debated any more. Even BIM.

Another theme that is just starting to be discussed in the profession is outsourcing, and there was one session at the convention devoted specifically to it. This session explored whether outsourcing represents a threat or an opportunity for American architects, what were the risks and rewards, and what steps should be taken to set up an effective offshore unit. The conclusion was that outsourcing is inevitable and will be required by firms to stay competitive, and the firms that would hurt the most by this growing phenomenon would be mid-size firms (10 to 100 people). The whole discussion, however, was focused on the current CAD-centric scenario, where drawing production is generally a tedious and time-consuming process and therefore a prime candidate for outsourcing. How this scenario will change with BIM, where drawing production is automated and cannot be separated from design, was not clear. Also, another session at the conference highlighted the growing trend towards fast-track projects, where the design phase is so focused and compressed that outsourcing parts of it would simply not work. It seems somewhat ironical that just when outsourcing is about to take off in the architectural profession, the practice and processes themselves may change and render the benefits of outsourcing no longer as compelling.

News from the Expo Floor

In contrast to the general sessions and seminars, technology was much very alive and in demand at the Expo floor where attendees thronged the booths in High-Tech Pavilion. Several vendors were showcasing new releases of their products. These include the AutoCAD 2005 family of products from Autodesk (see my recent reviews of AutoCAD 2005 and ADT 2005 and the MicroStation V8 2004 Edition product line from Bentley (see more about this in my recent newsletter on Bentley's BE conference.

Additionally, Autodesk took the opportunity to show how the benefits of BIM could be extended beyond automated drawing production and coordination by demonstrating the use of two third-party applications that work with Autodesk Revit. Green Building Studio by GeoPraxis is a web-based application that works with a gbXML file exported from Revit, and uses the building information it needs to perform a DOE-2 energy simulation. It allows a proposed design to be quickly evaluated for energy performance and also makes it easy to compare the simulation results for multiple options by displaying them together in one table. Given the emphasis of the convention on green/sustainable design, this demonstration was very timely. The other application showing the integrated workflow benefit of BIM was e-SPECS for Revit by InterSpec, which automatically creates and updates project specifications of a Revit building model, ensuring their coordination and accuracy.

Graphisoft didn't have a new release of ArchiCAD to show—version 9 is expected later on in the year—but it used the Expo to demonstrate customer stories of the advanced use of ArchiCAD for building modeling (see my recent feature on the Eureka Tower project. Nemetschek North America demonstrated the recently released VectorWorks ARCHITECT 11, featuring enhanced tools for making drawing production more efficient, new page layout capabilities, reduced file sizes, faster and more robust modeling, new and faster rendering modes including artistic styles, real-time texture mapping and editing, and support for QuickTime VR as well as for AutoCAD 2004 and ACIS solids. (See my review of an earlier release, VectorWorks ARCHITECT 9.5).

In Cadence AEC Tech News #101, I had described form•Z's new open architecture, the stage for which was set in version 4.0. At the AIA Expo, we finally had a chance to see this in action in the new version, 4.5, which releases the API (Application Programming Interface) and script language. This allows external functionality to be added to form•Z in the form of plugins or scripts, several of which were demonstrated at the show. Other new features in version 4.5 include the ability to place smooth text in addition to facetted text, a Draft Sweep tool that allows several options for transforming a source shape as it is swept along a path, a new Frame plugin tool that transforms any object into a frame-like structure, and the ability to clone objects so that a change in one object can be automatically applied to all the clones.

Another popular application that was previewing a new version was SketchUp (see my newsletter on SketchUp 3.0 in Cadence AEC Tech News #102). Coming up in the soon-to-be-released version 4.0 are several new tools with unconventional names typical of the application: Follow Me, which pushes and pulls a surface along a path and can be used to quickly create stair railings, moldings, tubing, and other extruded objects; Texture Tweaker, which allows a texture or photograph to be stretched and manipulated across any continuous surface; Face Me, which allows 2D models of people and other entourage to always face the camera; Intersector, which works like a Split tool to allow boolean-like operations; and a new Ruby Scripting Interface that allows automation of tasks and the creation of parametric objects.

Several products were also making their AIA Expo debut at this year's convention. These will be described in detail in the next issue of the AECbytes newsletter. Stay tuned!

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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