The MacLeamy Curve - Real World BIM and IPD.

The MacLeamy Curve is often referred to in discussions about building information modeling and ingtegrated project delivery. MacLeamy refers to Patrick MacLeamy, CEO of HOK. While more than one person claims the credit for having developed similar graphs and ideas, Patrick has continually demonstrated leadership in actually applying the ideas. He also created a very good video series on "The Future of The Building Industry" which I highly recommend. Patrick is also a strong advocate for interoperability and is the International Chair for buildingSMART. The image makes obvious what many of us in the business know both intuitively and from years of painful personal experience - the entire process in architecture, engineering and construction is broken and inefficient.

As the architects Kieran and Timberlake make clear in this quote from their book, Refabricating Architecture,

"The single most devastating consequence of modernism has been
the embrace of a process that segregates designers from makers:
The architect has been separated from the contractor, and the
materials scientist has been separated from the product engineer."

by integrating design with fabrication and construction, the improvements in efficiency and predictability can be extreme. So why isn't it happening?

Combine these inefficiencies with dropping productivity in the building industry, clearly illustrated in the chart below by Dr. Paul Teicholz of Stanford's CIFE, and one wonders why the industry refuses to evolve.


















Our work is focused on applying a fully integrated design-fabricate-build process. This is rarely even discussed and certainly almost never applied. To better define the process I often refer people this definition of fabrication information modeling as defined by Acecad/Strucad (recently acquired by Trimble).

Rather than waste more time endlessly discussing the inefficiencies of the industry, why don't do change by demonstrating what is possible on real building projects?

Founders of Leap Motion: Our Amazing 3D Tracking Will Be Everywhere - Where will it be in Architecture, Engineering and Construction?

Watch this video and ponder what tens of thousands of software developers will do with Leap Motion once they get there hands on the developer kits.




For more information read the full article on the Singularity Hub website here. Take a look at the Leap Motion website, and join the discussion in the Linkedin Group Leap Motion.

McGraw Hill is hosting a conference called FutureTech in San Francisco on July 10th. Included are session on Augmented Reality and other new technologies in architecture, engineering and construction. The list of speakers is impressive, and the focus is the construction industry as is made clear in the marketing blurb below,

"You will also hear where the next wave of exciting innovations will be coming from that will continue to provide powerful benefits to early adopters and change the landscape of the construction industry forever."

And while a few hundred AEC professionals converge in San Francisco to discuss technology-meets-AEC, a few hundred developers will be too busy coding to attend. Despite all the talk about building information modeling and virtual design and construction, the information technology industry and the AEC industry still don't really trust one another and are barely on speaking terms (my opinion from spending more than 10 years in each industry). Software will eat the AEC industry, as it is almost every other industry, and with hardware/software innovation like the Leap, the potential (inevitability) for massive disruption grows daily. The vast majority in the industry will miss the opportunity because they fear change, but it will be forced upon them by consumers themselves who will use new technologies to interact with product and service vendors thereby forcing change from the demand side.

Imagine how much change will occur between the sessions at this year's conference and next year's conference. Tens of thousands of developers will be developing demos and applications using Leap Motion and a few hundred (or even thousand) will focus on computer-aided-design data, and the really forward looking ones will focus on design and computer-aided-manufacturing data, linking design and fabrication. This is where it gets really interesting. And it is the area we are focused on.

This is going to be a wild ride indeed.

Digital Fabrication: From Digital to Material

Although this 3 page PDF is from 2003, it is still a very good introduction to digital fabrication for architecture, engineering and construction. The author is Branko Kolarevic and it contains edited excerpts from his book, Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing.

Leap Motion in Architecture, Engineering and Construction

How can one use this technology in the building industry? We have a few ideas. Watch (interact with) this space.

I started a discussion on the Leap Motion Forum with this title, "Leap in the $4.8 trillion architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry" which now has more than 1,300 views. Not surprising given that in a recent announcement the Leap team stated that over 400 of the 26,000 applicants for their software development kit (SDK) indicated they intended to focus on computer-aided design (CAD) interface enhancements

For more information visit the Leap website, read this review by Wired (their video review embedded below) and join the linked in group "Leap Motion" to join in the discussion.



Using Leap for augmented reality apps in AEC has great potential. While there has already been a lot of discussion about using augmented reality in the industry, leap technology will enable any user to interactive with 3D model data intuitively. And as the interactive functionality supports an increasing amount of real-time, multi-user collaborative design, the possibilities seem almost endless.

McGraw Hill Construction is hosting a Future Tech event in San Francisco on July 10 and the 9 - 10 am session is on Digital Visualization and Augmented Reality. Ideally it will be possible to include a demonstration showing AEC content using leap motion technology at the event.

And on Leap and the Third Industrial Revolution, here is a link to the discussion on the Leap Forums. Although the AEC industry has thus far been minimally impacted by software and technology, most of the really compelling innovation is technology-based, and the greatest potential to realize vast gains in efficiency will be through industrialization, however painful and slow that process is.

Wood 2.0: mass timber and the tall buildings of tomorrow

Great to see the growing interest in massive timber buildings in North America. A good article here from Arstechnica. Great to see Hans-Erik Blomgren from the Arup office in Seattle heavily quoted. Here is a link to a video showing Hans-Erik Blomgren and the architect Joe Mayo making a presentation on digitally fabricated solid wood wall buildings to the Seattle Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability Committee.


And be sure to download the free report on "Tall Wood" from the architect Michael Green.

Manufacturing: The Third Industrial Revolution and Collaborative Manufacturing

Two very interesting articles in the Economist.

Manufacturing: The third Industrial Revolution - The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made - and change the politics of jobs too

and also

Collaborative manufacturing: All together now - The advantages of crowdsourcing

As a person working in digital fabrication, I found both of these articles very interesting and also wonder how and when these converging trends will impact AEC (architecture, engineering and construction). When will building industry companies using business models similar to Local Motors emerge, with open design competitions similar to quirky with on-demand fabrication using cnc robotics? MFG.com is already very successful for widely distributed manufacturing but because buildings are integrated systems, assembly is efficient if it is too widely distributed. Quirky is doing interesting collaborative work as are the additive fabrication companies Ponoko and Shapeways. But the building industry? Our friends at the non-profit group Architecture for Humanity have been very successful at building community. I don't expect there will be one optimal model because the product is too varied, but it will be interesting to watch different systems emerge. Currently I find more of these companies in Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Austria then in North America. When will the local players emerge? Building has always been a very "local manufacturing" business and although design and fabrication can be widely distributed, assembly in to many locations becomes to complex and on site inspection requirements are also a major constraint.

An interesting problem and opportunity.

Gaming Company Business Culture and Architecture, Engineering and Construction

To paraphrase the quote attributed to Science Fiction author, William Gibson, "the Future of building is already here, it is just unevenly distributed."

During my 20 years in the building industry I have been disappointed at how slow change happens in one of the oldest and largest industries on the planet.

I believe the biggest constraint to change is not regulation and litigation but rather the business cultures inside of companies in AEC. I also worked for many years in San Francisco and gained an appreciation for how quickly things change in the information technology industry. If only we could merge the two.

It would be great to work at an AEC industry company that had a culture similar to the one described in this job offer at the gaming company Valve. Indeed, imagine how much easier it would be to attract great employees and continually innovate if one could create such a company.