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TECHNOLOGY A SUPPLEMENT OF THE ZWEIG LETTER
Prediction: Data will drive design At this year’s AEC Technology Symposium and Hackathon attendees were encouraged to learn, generate ideas, and more. By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
HACKERS – READY, SET, GO! CORE studio, a group within Thornton Tomasetti, is a firm-wide virtual incubator of ideas. Its mission is to increase the value it brings to clients through innovation. The studio coordinates research and development, creates custom software and apps, designs workflows to optimize project realization, and develops computational models. They recently released Spectacles, a hackable BIM viewer for the web. Spectacles allows authors in the AEC industry to view their 3-D design work on the web for free, and is designed to be hacked, extended, and modified. They have been working on the project on and off for the past year, and are quite excited for more hackers in the industry to get their hands on it! Spectacles currently consists of a hackable HTML5 web viewer that runs natively in modern browsers (no plugin required), and a pair of exporters for popular authoring applications in the AEC industry – Grasshopper and Revit. BIM data can be exported from these desktop applications, and viewed on the web using Spectacles. For more information: core.thorntontomasetti. com/apps/Spectacles/
T hornton Tomasetti (New York, NY), a 1,200-person in- ternational engineering firm, recently presented its third annual Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Technol- ogy Symposium and Hackathon in October. The AEC Tech- nology Symposium and Hackathon brings together profes- sionals to discuss recent advances in computational design, analysis, construction, and fabrication and to collaborate on new ideas and processes for the AEC industry. The symposium explored topics such as data-driven city plan- ning, machine learning for building design, the benefits of open source development, and state-of-the-art AEC research. The symposium was followed by a two-day hackathon de- signed to challenge participants to generate new ideas and processes for the AEC community through data-driven de- sign and web-based applications. The weekend also includ- ed workshops covering topics such as Dynamo, Grasshopper, various APIs, and 3-D printing. Members of Thornton Tomasetti’s CORE studio spoke at the symposium, including Principal Robert Otani and Associ- ate Justin Nardone. Other speakers included Constantine E. Kontokosta of the NYU Center for Urban Science and Prog- ress, Christopher Connock of Kieran Timberlake , Andrew Heumann of NBBJ , and Alex Lirtsman and Gareth Price of Ready Set Rocket. See HACKATHON, page 4
Justin Nardone Associate CORE Studio.
THE ZWEIG LETTER NOVEMBER 2, 2015, ISSUE 1126
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