Wot is it? Twitterspectrum

At this address: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterSpectrum/TwitterSpectrum.html there is a great toy. It lists two interlocking tag spectra if given two words. This example shows the tag spectrum for the two words 'architecture' and 'window'.



The overlap area is for 'architecture' OR 'window' AND 'tag keyword'... not quite what I expected to be the content out. I had hoped assumed that it was showing overall keyword + tag on the left and right and in the middle both keywords + tag...

Still - a search engine for twitter based upon content not person's name is great.

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California Academy of Sciences - a LEED Platinum Museum

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Munch Museum on waterfront in Oslo - another model?

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Atlanta's Centre for Covil and Human Rights - another building to model?

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2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network

2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network

Now this looks like an interesting project.

Let's hope they get beyond the knee-jerk more daylight is good design reactions we have had of late to the work of Heschong Mahone Group.

There has also been some work done in New Zealand on this topic by Quentin Jackson - essentially testing whether the methodology of HMG could be replicated in a very different environment. Quentin concluded that the methodology was sound, but had insufficient number of students to suggest that his conclusions applied to the broad New Zealand population.

What seems to be clear from both the HMG work and from Quentin's work is that the differences in performance between students when grouped according to the differences in the physical environment were about the same order of magnitude as the differences in performance when grouped by teacher. The quality of the physical is surprisingly as important as the teacher if one looks at measurable performance in standardised tests...!

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Movie about Rem Koolhaas coming to Wellington

Can't find the times on the Paramount web site, but according to Wotzon, on Fri 10 Apr 11.00am and Sun 12 Apr 1.00pm at the Paramount in Courtenay Place a documentary will screen about the former film director, author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan and architect of what to me embodies in one building the best and worst of auteur architecture: the Casa da Musica in Porto:

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Architectural Firms Compete to Design African American History Museum - washingtonpost.com

The Washington Post writes (28 March 2009): "The future National Museum of African American History and Culture -- as envisioned by competing teams of architects -- will most likely include water features and music halls, evocations of slave ships and the African past, and vistas acknowledging its important, monumental neighbors.

Perhaps not enough information to make a model - yet...?

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Web 2.0 - 2009

The lecture today trawled through the concept of Web 2.0: A google 'define': search produces the following Wiktionary definition: "The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content".

The original Web 1.0 was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990's. The arrival of Mark Andreesen's Mosaic web browser around the same time created accessible content: the first mix of text and images on the web, proving to be so powerful a trend that it "made the front page of the New York Times business section".

Examples of interactive web sites discussed are:
Flickr
Twitter
Blogger
del.icio.us

Technologies that are useful in the Web 2.0 world include RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and folksonomies built on simple tags [A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. ..]. The highlighted links at the top left edge of the BBSC 303 Digital Craft Course Information web page is constructed from an RSS feed reporting my Google (RSS) Reader subscriptions under the label 'architecture'. Just below this is a feed of my most recent del.icio.us links.

Other interactive web sites / services include:
facebook
myspace
bebo

In addition, we watched a couple of youtube videos:

The point? Assignment 2 requires you to "... actively document and collaborate online with your team partner and present the development of your project online in the form of a website." The goal therefore is to create a blog EACH, reporting your collaboration. The technologies of Web 2.0 are what will make our web sites readable, informative and able to be navigated simply.

The lecture concluded by referring back to the simple web page tutorial linked to the course web site. We covered again the use of HTML (hyper-text markup language) to place around text or media that affect its display. In particular we looked at the hypertext linking tag.

File translation issues:

The lecture on Tuesday 17 March and the tutorials on Thursday 19 March focused n file translation issues between the different original file formats in CAD and the 3DS Max file formats.

CAD	3DS Max 9 for LS	3DS ax 2009 for mr
Archicad	Export to .dwg: import via Legacy dwg	Export to 3ds; import
AutoCAD	import via Legacy dwg	import via Legacy dwg
Revit	export to dwg. import via Legacy dwg	export to fbx; import via fbx

NOTE: as covered in the online tutorials and in the tutorial class on Thursday, the Right Hemisphere product Deep Exploration can be used to clean up the object names in 3DS Max so that the renderers work properly.

Lecture 2: 2009 - Rendering with Max

The strategies for completing a rendering - a summary of the approaches that need to be adopted to Render within Max.

Basic concepts (summarised from tutorials):

• Global illumination - Radiance (Light Studio) and mentalray
• materials are specific to the renderer
  

1. light studio materials for LightStudio
2. Pro-materials for mentalray OR
3. Arch and Design materials for mentalray
   

• LightStudio only works in Max 9
• mentalray works in Max 9 and 2009: recommend the latter
• in both renderers define a sun and sky in very similar ways

1. Light Studio: Create tab/panel: Systems. Pull-down Light Studio option. Select Daylight. Choose location; date; time
2. mentalray: Pull Down menu. Lighting System wizard. Select tab. Create. Choose location; date; time. Accept options to make sky match sun and to set exposure for daylight with yes.

• in both renderers the 'indirect' illumination in bounces (mr) or as the 'indirect' box (LS) need to be a minimum of 2 outside, and 5 to 7 inside.
• In LS there are two render types: "Simple" FOR PREVIEWS ONLY and "Expert" for producing the actual renders.
• In LS there are many different materials, but 'plastic', 'glass', metal are the ones normally used. Have fun making a metal walled Gehry building!
• The LS manual is siomple and easy to read. The two tutoriala online should take you through all you need to know (the second 'advanced' tutorial is about lighting studies, but the materials section is useful for this course)
• mentalray has 'Global Illumination', 'Final Gather' and 'Caustics' settings: for this tutorial and most of this course, we will ONLY use 'Final Gather'.
  

Lecture - 1: 2009

Topics covered in the lecture:

The Course Objectives
The Tasks to be completed to meet these Objectives

• Task 1 - the tutorial exercises in Archicad, AutoCAD Architecture and Revit - plus Maxrender
• Task 2 - collaborating in the construction of a complex digital model of a daylit gallery
• Task 3 - creating a blog and web page to summarise the digital modelling

The Assessment Contract - and its role in reducing stress and workload
Workload management

The links to the past year's work:

• The Digital Craft BBSC 303 section of the www.arch.school.nz web site for models created between 1998 and 2005.
  
• And in particular the 'buildings' summary of these models.
• Plus the 'Reasonate' web site created by David Harrison in 2006
• Plus the Blogger web sites created by 303 students in 2007

Strategies for completing the tutorials and for choosing a partner to work with on the assignments.

More Autodesk Acquisitions!

At Nex Gen VizTod Stephens has noted the following Autodesk press release:

Friday, October 24, 2008

Autodesk Acquiring Softimage

Autodesk announced yesterday that they are acquiring Softimage.


It's becoming easier this year to see where the conspiracy theorists get their ideas from. Those who would claim that Autodesk is buying up companies so their direct competition do not would point to this as another in the long line of defensive acquisitions. Personally I am not sure, but this is a major buying spree!

I note on the same web site from August 20, 2008:

Autodesk Announces ImageModeler 2009Autodesk announced the release of ImageModeler 2009 at SIGGRAPH last week. This is the first Autodesk release of the software since they purchased it from REALVIZ. ImageModeler is used to create photorealistic 3D objects from photographs, including accurate 3D measurements.


RealViz was one of my favourite non-Autodesk tools that had lots of potential but an apparently small following - and the French developers seemed to have a great web site but no marketing smarts. Until last year when Autodesk bought it. I was starting to wonder what had happened to it. I investigated upgrading our classroom set earlier this year and despite the Autodesk front page to the web site got the usual slow runaround ...

Now, this looks like much better news. Presence with fanfare at Siggraph..

However, on another note, I am working my way through the Max Daylighting tool and wanted to compare its output to Radiance. The best way looked to be to use the 'new' Windows executables available from Francesco Anselmo's MinGW-Radiance distribution with the Radiance Control Panel from Ecotect. I have the RCP from v5.6. However, it is no longer downloadable from 'Autodesk Ecotect' web site... Pity. It was one of the more thorough and robust windows front ends to Radiance. No apparent reason for Autodesk to take it off the list of free software?

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The world of Art has more money than the world of Building Research!

Check this out!

In Building research we try to get a budget to put some instrumentation into a building someone else is already planning to pay for... Temporarily. With this approach we work with the designers to improve what the owner is prepared to pay for - or if we are REALLy lucky - we get a small part of the research budget to add a detail (solar water heater? fancy smart glazing?) to the design.

It seems the Chicago based Museum of Science and Industry  has a different budget!

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New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp

Mac 3D: New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp -- UK-based developer has new LightUp SketchUp Plugin for Photo-Realistic Rendering and it works on the Mac!The news on the interweb at present - more and more and more plugins for SketchUp. Photorealistic = pretty or realistic or REAL? $64k question

read more | digg story

Planning a Semantic Web site

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear.

For the first time, in many years of following this stuff - since timbl first started writing his web from 50,000ft missives - the very readability of this article gives me hope I might be a participant, not just a user...

read more | digg story

Experimental REFERENCE (from the article): Semantic Web

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
Incroyable! Where in the world does this hype come from?

And what's more, only a few people in the world seem to be asking sensible questions about it yet. And even then, the organisations that ask these questions such as the 'Greenwash Brigade' show their own biases when entering the 'buy local' debate. When they ask 'is a buy local economy really sustainable?' they adopt a xenophobic analysis that appears to assume that anything foreign is almost always bad and limits its reasonable compromise trade ideas to under or over 16okm distances within the USA. What chance remote places (New Zealand pop 4m or Samoa pop 214k) to produce anything but a few of the basics of life in such a non-trading future? The impression that is provided is the historic US isolationist 'I'm alright Jack' approach.

Very few people seem to be addressing the real issues: what are these buildings like to be in? (A couple of people who are: Usable Buildings and 'Performance in Practice' ). From time to time one hears rumours about buildings that have 'gone wrong' and are no longer being touted as 'low energy' / 'good passive design' / 'sustainable' / 'healthy'. What seems to happen, as I heard when I asked about a building I had photographed when on a visit to the USA recently - and about which I had blogged a year or so ago, is that the owners shut down all discussion. This just adds to the legends of sun umbrellas inside to combat solar glare and debates about whether the required performance analyses were done. Perhaps we would move beyond just ticking the appropriate in a LEED score system if we honestly reported mistakes and examined why they occurred? If assessing the performance of a building from its users point of view became mainstream... this type of press coverage would cease. Instead of passing on uncritically the PR of the designers, we would be reading carefully constructed assessments of the real performance 'meters' - the people who live in and occupy the buildings and their community of passers-by and other affected people.

Ref: 'It's way to easy being Green': "Installing a $395 bike rack is worth the same under the LEED checklist system as installing a $1.3 million environmentally sensitive heating system."

Air Conditioning

This post is about two things - a talk on Passive Cooling in Malaysia and this extract from an email that i received today:
Attire
Conference attire is business casual. We recommend bringing a jacket or sweater (the conference rooms are air-conditioned) and comfortable shoes for the walk between the [conference hotel name] Hotel and the Conference Center.

At the presentation by a visiting colleague from Malaysia on alternatives to air conditioning in large buildings in Malaysia, it was noted that for passive cooling to work one needs reliable air movement and this is not available in much of urban Malaysia. Even in areas where breezes occur, one needs tallish buildings to rise above the shelter provided by other structures to be exposed to the wind. This suggest some issues of privilege where passive cooling is only for those rich enough to be able to afford to live at a high level. However, what interested me was the temperature set points and comfort in Malaysia: questions of persuading people to lift the set points of their chiller to 24C instead of 22C! In the temperature measurement studies, with passive cooling the spaces being cooled were at 26-28C! This would suggest that passive cooling is an impossible goal - never achieving 'comfort'. Or perhaps - using the the adaptive comfort model [Brager and de Dear (DOI: doi:10.1016/S0378-7788(97)00053-4 Energy and Buildings Volume 27, Issue 1, February 1998, Pages 83-96) ] - we behave differently in air conditioned as opposed to naturally ventilated buildings.

So, coming back to the conference email, someone like myself who has very little day to day experience of air conditioning, and is therefore adapting to my hotel room internal climate needs this type of warning because in my experience the conference seminar room air con is freezing. What these people are saying is that it is so cold in the conference seminar rooms you will need to wear a jacket to stay comfortable! I cannot help but think we might be able to develop a huge window of energy availability by altering thermostat settings on chillers in cold climates. I have recently in China experienced the awfulness of air con: walk the streets and suffer in high humidity and 35+C temperatures. Walk into a shop - though the wide open door and feel so cold that a jersey is needed. This is just plain insanity.

On a rough calculation: if the temperature outside is averaging 34C and inside is set to 22C - then the savings of a 28C set point are around 50%! And I believe that the adaptive temperature studies suggest that people would not be less comfortable - they might even be less stressed, not having to cope with such extremes of temperature inside and out.

Casa da Musica: Rem Koolhaas building in Porto

VRMAG - VIRTUAL TOUR OF REM KOOLHAAS’ CASA DA MUSICA, PORTO

I visited this building in 2005. My photographs however do not compare to these 15 x 360 panoramas. These do give a good feel for what i might be like to be in / visiting the building.

It is to me a building that demonstrates the power of careful thought and analysis to achieve the best building science as well as architectural outcome. However, given the delays and cost increases, it is also a building that appears yet again to give a bad name to this type of architecture - architecture that tries to push the boundaries.


Technorati Tags: auditorium, architecture, koolhaas, acoustics,

Information Modelling In Action

The Freedom Tower: Information Modelling In Action - CBRonline.com Computer Business Review online writes about BIM! Quote from Paul Seletsky of SOM: "...Autodesk Revit Building 3D modelling gives the architects the ability not only to visualise their models in 3D, but have those models tied to 2D plans too: if a value is changed in the model, it is reflected in the plans and vice versa. It also enables simulations such as likely building temperatures, pedestrian flow (including in a potential emergency), the lighting as the sun moves across the sky, and so on." I guess this is BIM in action ...

But it all seems a little too pat. The details are sketchy in a general business magazine like this of course. But the details are where the problems arise. Did the HVAC consultants and the fire engineers really use the 3D model? Did they make modifications and send them back to the central model? What were the SOM resources required to make this all happen?

My experience so far is that using the collaboration features of the software (ArchiCAD/Revit?ADT/Microstation) requires a major support effort from technicians running the network and servers to the users rejigging their manner of working to recognise who has control of what parts of the 'model' they are working on. And that's just with the 3D model in-house... well in my class. What about adding in several other software users, their ways of working and their program interfaces...

What is the reality?

Postopolis - blogs about architecture collide in NYC

Check this event Postopolis. out. (May 29 - June 2, 2007) The home blog pages of the organisers are (almost) all in the useful links in the sidebar at the right. After today I will be adding Inhabitat. At this early stage, the following links are really interesting:

• City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Paul Seletsky of SOM
• City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Matt Clark of Arup
• Inhabit's Jill Fehrenbacher's presentation in Pecha Kucha style
• I could not bring myself to listen to Lebbeus Woods yet again after wondering at the level of pretension in hearing him live in San Francisco some years ago... but if you have not encountered him, this could be of curiosity value - if only a la Derrida to hear the background to the person in order to (perhaps) understand his work?
  

I fully expect these links to grow and become more interesting as the diarists who are not as fast as City of Sound reflect on the event.