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architecture

Brentwood Tower 3 | Residential Tower

Brentwood Tower 3 | Residential Tower

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.

Stantec Tower | mixed use

Stantec Tower | mixed use

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

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. 

Brentwood Phase One | renovation

Brentwood Phase One | renovation

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.

Capital Market Authority Tower

Capital Market Authority Tower

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. 

CMA_01.jpg

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.