BIM adoption in Europe - McGraw Hill SmartMarket Report

Business Value of BIM

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

This is absolutely great. Inspiration in less than 6 minutes. Now if Martin's Open Source Ecology group connects to the open architecture network for open source community building around the world things will really take off. Indeed, open sourcing the "global village construction set."

Yes is More - B

Bjarke Ingels of Copenhagen-based group BIG tells us that yes is more, indeed. Great to see him also demonstrate that great design can also be green and that sustainable doesn't have to mean denial or living with less. Check out his Yes Is More book.

Demonstrating the potential of digital fabrication

A great video showing how technology enables innovative design. Additional project information from Gramazio and Kohler here.

The digital fabrication lab at ETH continues to inspire - and lead.

The Passive House battle rages on

I was one of over 170 attendees at the annual passive house regional meeting in Olympia, Washington on March 18th. Martin Holladay of the widely respected green building advisor really kicked the conversation off in a provocative keynote address questioning the appropriateness of the popular European performance standard for the North American market.

Read more here in a reconstruction of the presentation at the GBA website. And here is Michael Eliason of the Brute Force Collaborative Blog in his rebuttal. Treehugger chimed in as have many in the passive house community.

And now Graham Wright makes some great contributions on the Passive House Northwest website.

Still waiting for Wolfgang Feist himself to chime in.

Prefab Redux - another look at green prefab

From the Seattle Business Magazine April issue, "Prefab Redux"

Great to revisit the topic now that the hype has withered away. Such a shame that there is still so little discussion about how the majority of high-performance homes constructed to the strict passivhaus / passive house and Swiss Minergie performance standards are prefab. Then again, the Swiss, Germans, and Austrians are years ahead in integrating applied buildings science into the design-fabricate-construct process for high-performance building and even that is not generally recognized within the North American building community so of course there is little awareness about how they achieve and scale the process.

Practical BIM-to-CNC Workflow: Big Empowerment for the Small Firm

Jeff McGrew of Because We Can does a great job of introducing BIM to CNC work flows to architects in this short video.



In our video we show how the process and software work on a large-scale residential project






Here are photos of the fabrication, the on site assembly and the finished home in the Lake Tahoe region in California.

And finally, here is a short video showing a CNC Hundegger K2 in action



I also suggest joining the linkedin group "digital fabrication and design" for more related discussion with about 600 other members.