An informed and collaborative conception process and so on and so forth

1.

As part of the course "Architectural Concept", I gave a lecture yesterday at KTH School of Architecture, about characteristics of the ultimate digital media for design conception. It was preceded by an appealing and inspiring presentation of a selected array of works of Tham and Vinegård architectural office by Martin Vinegård. The new School of Architecture of KTH with its radically curvature exterior was among the works.

The first and main part of my presentation was an assortment of brief introductions to a number of subjects with regard to their relation to building design initiation and implemented tools and media for this purpose: architectural concept, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), Building Information Modelling (BIM) and BIM model servers.

Since not all students were familiar enough with topics such as BIM and IPD, it was not possible to fully focus on the main theme of building conception tools, though I utilized such an index-style and summed it up all by introducing concrete examples of available digital tools in the field. Examples varied across a broad range of media from environmental analysis plug-ins for SketchUp such as gModeller, IES VE and OpenStudio to collaborative and integrated use of Excel sheets, SketchUp and Onuma BIM Server. My intention was to emphasizes the importance of interoperable and easy-to-use digital tools for realizing an interactive, collaborative, information-rich, analytic and visual building conception process.

2.

I got both surprised and delighted when Jonas Runberger showed me their 3D printer and some basic "printed" volumes in School of Architecture since I had already indulged myself for some time in reading about the phenomenon here and there. There are lots of potentials in this trend; yet in order that building industry may in its full capacity benefit from 3D printing for automation and optimization, fabrication and manufacture of building products and material among all need to undergo revolutionary changes.

3.

Finally, contacts were made for arranging a 3D laser scanning experiment here in our department and I am enthusiastically looking forward to that. Newly-constructed buildings are only a small fragment of the entire building stock. Hence, in order to be able to efficiently preach and practice approaches such as sustainability and BIM, it is strongly required to capture existing built environment and translate the data into pieces of knowledge that are commensurate and compatible with our contemporary building information. 3D laser scanning has proved to be an opportune entry gate to this field.