Entry for Burning Man 2019
My work on Royal Columbian Hospital began with my Regional BIM Role providing oversight onto the agreements being made around BIM delivery. This project was unique since it was the first one for the Fraser Health Authority to have their new relationship with Summit BIM, a BIM consultant group in Canada. This project was to kick off the Fraser's road to full life cycle BIM and intelligent Facilities Maintenance.
Mechanical and Structural Coordination
My role grew from BIM oversight into being the lead for digital agreements on the team with Bird Construction and Stantec. Outside of that, my rendering abilities were also leveraged with the newly available Enscape rendering tool for Revit. The rendering work turned into updating families across the project so any portion of it could be visualized with the real time rendering engine that Enscape provided.
We explored new coordination technology from Revizto on this project. While I can't see it was a "cultural" success within the large and diverse set of teams it was certainly a good proof of concept for the project leaders. Fraser Health and Bird liked so much they both became clients of the software and we continue to discuss how it could be built into the project workflow better on future projects.
I keep a relationship with BIM TOPiCS Lab at UBC with Dr. Sheryl Staub-French where she sends her bright students to intern with me. Jatin Maheshwary was one of those students who took a deep dive into automating BIM Compliance and Management under my and Ryan's supervision for RCH.
It was a three year road to this opportunity with Stantec. I came to the corporation within one of the business lines that used a lot of BIM technology and got access to virtual reality, augmented reality and mobile app development through the Creativity and Innovation Program. After continuing to appear in a number of the research initiatives, the conversation of "innovative technology" started to happen with senior leaders.
There had been an opening for a Director role for technology that I applied for with a 9 year plan for the business line that I was in (employing a little over five thousand architects and engineers). I didn't get that opportunity but the role I got was far more interesting... starting a formal research and implementation team at Stantec.
The team collaborates with many technology startups and experts outside the industry of AEC to gleen insights for technology development and truly cutting edge applications.
The Innovative Technology Development Team would have three focuses...
Advanced Visualization
Computational Design
Data Visualization
Each of the three focuses make a continual effort to understand the culture within each of the different business lines and find the right technology for each group. With so many unique work deliverable at Stantec, consideration must be given to legacy of delivery and unique skill sets developed within each sector and business line.
The Innovative Technology Development Team had the pleasure of having Marcella Bonanomi spend a portion of her Doctoral Thesis work with us in 2017 to study the hierarchy of the corporation and how economies of scale could be achieved with technology support and delivery. Below is a video that was one of the first explorations of how the entire corporation of 23,000 employees are structured.
The team continues and we've grown far beyond just myself. I'm very fortunate to have a team of eager and intelligent professionals that want to find the best uses of technology and build interoperable solutions for many forms of business.
Our current focuses are on how different disciplines interact with one another and removing redundancy in referencing. Often times, teams are forced to duplicate work or recreate work to have workflows in their preferred software. We're investigating problems like that along with difficult design challenges that require more sophisticcated uses of technology like Project Fractal or Grasshopper wtihin Rhino.
Full time members: Alyssa Haas, Achintya Bhat, Rael Romero and Chuck Lousnbury
UBC Interns : Marcella Bonanomi, Helina Merkub Gebru and Jatin Maheshwary
Innovative Technology Development Team's first Halloween, 2017, We were computer errors!
Colleague, Ryan Wells, exhibiting in one of my favorite images. I had arranged for an ultra short throw projector to be mounted on a late 80s era drafting table. The projector was connected to a laptop running a cloud app to digitally review drawings. The same tools that most senior reviewers used could be used on this set up, straight edges, rulers and french curves... just needed the stylus in place of the red pen.
There was a lot of work Stantec did at the Amazing Brentwood site for Shape Properties and Tower 3 was the first of the work to be an all Stantec design and delivery. This was also the first project at Stantec where I was given the opportunity to set up the Revit environment with all of my preferences. After the success of my other technology research initiatives I was also given carte blanche for the environment and I choose to experiment with A360 Team.
The most impressive aspect of pushing into this new technology was that it was truly cloud based. Review teams no longer needed special software to be a part of the project and even our client was given Autodesk accounts to log in and check on our BIM progress. This was a brave new world of collaboration and one of the biggest jobs was to have all of the teams agree to the new digital environment... this took time but ultimately we were able to showcase the time being saved and that the security was even better than we could afford to provide.
At the time in 2016, A360 Team was a brand new online collaboration and delivery platform from Autodesk that leveraged C4R (collaboration for Revit). This allowed teams to collaborate with a cloud based central model and freed the teams up from having to exchange background files every week. Brentwood Tower 3 was the first large scale project at Stantec to leverage this tool and explore all of its features with my advocacy and interest for better collaboration.
Capturing the markup process has been an endeavor that I have been continually searching for better ways to solve with technology. The industry is stuck in a very old fashion of putting red ink on paper, or digital red ink on PDFs but there has yet to be a truly intelligent way to capture the process and store the completion in a database of sorts. There are other tools, like Revizto, that do solve that very problem that I'm currently attempting to advocate for. BIM360's commenting feature is a big more like a social media platform and not a functional capture but it's ease of access is unprecedented. Log into a website on any device and start marking up drawings. It's incredible.
I was interviewed along with my colleague, Felix Tan, on our success with BIM360 Team at Autodesk University in 2016. This video continued to be their marketing piece for BIM360 through 2018.
This was a project I helped with Rendering and adding intelligence to a Window Wall system. Window Walls are difficult to do in Revit without custom family building since the Curtain Wall tool is centric to identifying individual panels and mullions instead of a panel module of the two.
The custom family I built enabled the team to have an intelligent window wall family that could be typed to the manufacturing specifications and continue iterations of design with the quantities of each automatically appearing on a sheet schedule. This was especially useful for this project that was budget conscious and going through many series of estimations.
In addition to adding intelligence to the BIM environment, this was one of the first projects I played with Esncape on. Enscape is a real time render engine that loads within Revit and allows for change on the fly renderings.
Early Stage Revit model with execavtion modeled and quantified.
This was an all Stantec Disciplines project where we utilized BIM360 Team and Collaboration for Revit. I had BIM Management oversight for the project and executed renderings. It was one of the first times I had attempted professional use with Enscape but ultimately delivered the project with A30 Rendering Cloud from Autodesk with Photoshop.
“Leveraging BIM360 for the first time - enjoy this interactive example from early in the project process.”
Modeling completed in Revit, rendered with Autodesk's A360 Cloud and post production completed in Photoshop.
University of British Columbia has one of the most interesting sites in the city of Vancouver, right in the middle of downtown at the most public square in the community - Robson Square. The site is incredibly contentious, with many parties having a say in what happens on the land.
I had the pleasure of working with Designer, Kim Glauber and Project Architect, Doug Hamming; both of whom had been on the project a couple of years before I came along. The project needed to produce a set of schematic drawings to go another round of public engagement sessions and I was given the opportunity to help make this a Revit project.
Interestingly, there was a surveying company in town that had lidar scanned the site and covered the point cloud into an IFC model that I was then able to bring into Revit. I used a deductive modeling approach to capturing the glazing system in Revit so the glass box could have a parametric relationship (hosted by reference planes) between the complex primary structure.
Kim, was crucial in the BIM at the Human Scale research to figuring out the spherical output from 3DSMax and made this one of the first projects at Stantec to be showcased in mobile Virtual Reality.
This project was a great showcase of modeling approach and was selected as a Case Study Project to present at the 2016 North American RTC Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
This was a multi-office project between Vancouver, Edmonton, Victoria, Boston, Calgary and Toronto that involved all disciplines of Stantec. As Stantec's new headquarters building, it was an honorable project to participate on that pushed the boundary in every way. To make things even more complicated, Dialogue was the Prime Consultent for the Parkades that connected the entire city center and tunnels underneath the towers and arena together which added another layer of coordination on top of general building performance.
As a Revit project, I was brought on to lead the the BIM Management for the project as it transitioned into Construction Documents from Design Development. The previous management was relieved of their oversight after the project experienced poor performance. I broke up the many models and optimized them for loading time with worksets and different models for heavy annotation portions of the documentation. The project transitioned from Revit Server to BIM360 Teams and even leveraged Stantec's shiny new datacenter for remote users loggin in via Citrix.
From the fruits of labor the BIM at the Human Scale R&D, we were able to showcase the Spherecase immersive rendering workflow to the client. Although they did try using the cardboard VR viewers, they preferred just a portal view on the iPad. Very much a win for the spherical rendering output.
Click the above image to check out the spherical VR
I helped manage the models, model complex architecture, render, BOMA, area calculations, quantity take off and documentation.
This project was in many ways, my introduction to Stantec. This project had been ongoing for nearly two years when I joined and the Revit environment was one of the worst ones I had ever seen. It was a huge project, which is always hard to do "right" in Revit but worse, the entire project was in one Revit model. Over forty thousand people hours had already been put into model and attempting to optimize proved to be my primary goal.
I ended up remolding many of the complex facades and sectional geometry to help with the detailing effort. Ultimately, I made use of the Enterprise Agreement between Autodesk and Stantec and commissioned the first ever Autodesk Project review for Stantec. This was a great introduction into the process of Autodesk enterprise service options and what could be done for a project.
Ultimately, the project got patched as best as it could but limped to the finish line going from Revit Server, to the main network hosting and breaking out as much of the work as possible. As for the architectural efforts, I modeled parkade ramps, glazing and performed renders with Autodesk's A360 Cloud.
A Houston, Texas skyscraper renovation I worked on at ZCA in 2013.
In the spring of 2014, my ongoing relationship with WorldViz turned into a business case for a short stint of research and development at Ziegler Cooper. WorldViz used the proprietary "Vizard" game engine to run the models from digital architecture models. The workflow wasn't quite ready for large scale commercial work as the model optimization process required the geometry to a low amount of polygons and the yield from Revit was too high and too much rework for office projects.
The research did bring the Oculus SDK1 into the office and everyone enjoyed the initial real demos as a part of the research. Movement was tracked via a Kinect sensor.
2012 was the first year that I would go to Burning Man. I was a key member in founding the not for profit group, Houston CORE and ReinCOWnation was the first large scale effigy project for the Houston region to showcase at the event.
This was an incredible project for me where I did a wide spectrum of activities.
- Concept Design
- Grant Writing
- Event Management
- Building Management
- Photogrammetry
- Design Modeling
- Structural Coordination
- Logistical Strategy
- Construction
- Fire Safety
- Leave No Trace efforts and strategy
I learned from a lot of incredible new people who are now life long friends. In many ways this project was a line in the sand for my life as it marked a scale of work that I thoroughly enjoy and a level of complication in construction that is stimulating for me. Beyond all of that, it was a project on incredible coordination between artist, personalities and executors. We started with a simple idea from an individual in the community that became a clay model. Then a photogrammetry reality capture turned into a digital design model that output a CNC file to 4'x8' sheets of plywood to be assembled. The assembly was then put in a truck, driven thousands of miles and burned in the desert after a beautifully received display for one magical week.
While at Equipment Collaborative, I did the research and user experience design for a new database interface. The team had long been using a custom built solution out of Access (Microsoft product) that was long past its capability.
My research looked at linear versus non-linear database platforms, how the back end solution dictated front end ability and all of the various needs of the database. The intention was to release it as a web app that could be used on a iPad.
Workflows Researched:
- Equipment Data-basing
- Manufacture meta-data formats
- Procurement Process
- Project Planning Process
- Product Documentation Process
The design never came to fruition but the equipment planners all thought it would have been a great solution for their workflow. As a first foray into UX work, I came to appreciate the complex nature of database backend solutions and how that could effect overall design goals.
In my time with Equipment Collaborative, I was the BIM Manger and digital medium between their equipment planning database in Access and our delivery platform, Revit. My work consisted of making and refining many manufacturing assets into light weight Revit families that were quantifiable, useful for planning and looked good enough for rendering purposes in hospital user meetings.
It was during my time here that my interest in Virtual Reality began and many of these families where the first assets used in attempting to run real time graphics with WorldVIZ's product, Vizard.
I was the lead technician for this project at HOK. I managed all of the BIM models, assisted the designers with Rhino modelling and helped render images for client meetings with Aramco. HOK was the design architect for Omrania Architects who delivered the Construction Documents and managed the Construction Administration.
I was laid off by HOK during the economic crisis in 2009 and received a call four weeks later from Omrania asking me to join them in Bahrain. I would have taken it had I not already accepted the job at FKP as a BIM Manager for the Equipment Collaborative Team.
While at HOK, there was one huge project that many people worked on... King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This was HOK's first Revit project and it spanned over five offices with many external consultants.
This particular project focused on a few of the custom laser laboratories that were being specified for custom research projects. I worked with a turn key consultant for the custom fabrication of the laboratory equipment and modeled it and all of the equipment's required support (gas, air, liquids and water) to digitally coordinate the very complicated spaces.
It was on this work that I cut my teeth with Construction Document drawing and leveraged many of the advantages of Revit with BIM delivery. As an introduction to detailing design, I couldn't have asked for a more compliated or better project to learn on.
My first project out of school and my first project in Revit. Learned a lot of things on this project and was the sole technician for delivering it up to Construction Documents. I had great leaderships from two senior architects who eventually ended up learning some Revit from me during the duration of the project.
For a Revit project, in 2007, this was a difficult shape to detail a 60s era Army Corp of Engineers building that was essentially a prefabricated concrete, circular, warehouse for a humongous engine that powered the centrifuge that tested astronauts ability to hand intense g-force loads on their bodies. The make over on the building was intending to make a rocket study facility with a large computer datacenter to simulate rocket performance.
Towards the end of my academic career at the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, I was invited by one of my professors to take on a summer job to work on a physical model that represented the University's new fifty year plan for the campus.
My work was primarily in creating the content files for digital fabrication from Autocad, assembling the fabricated pieces into the buildings and wiring all of the electronics.
While taking a furniture course during my architecture college years, I was heavily influenced by my course in Digital Fabrication. Designing parametrically changed my overall approach to design and I explored complex fabrication concepts with multiple planes of construction reference.
This "chair" was intended to sit upside down in to have blood circulation flow quickly through the brain and recharge the mind. An idea I was hopeful would help with sleep deprivation, something all too common in architecture school.
The design process involved researching ergonomic principles, measuring my own body via photographs and then modeling in Rhino. I output the model into CNC files for wood fabrication.
LITE Beam was a semester long class project in a first of its kind in the architecture curriculum. Digital Fabrication was an emerging concept for architecture as digital design modeling became more parametric and easier to manage manufacturing criteria. Our class was lead by Andrew Vrana and Joe Meppelink and this was the first iteration of this class that still exists today.
Our aim was a small studio, was to make a modular ceiling unit. Our materials were architectural foam, metal, acrylic and metal wire. I did work in Rhino, CNC file creation, electric wiring and assembly labor.
It was this class that sparked my love of parametric design and digital fabrication that primed me for BIM work and a life enriched with what could be done if better merged with technology.
