I sat in on a Workshop at Build Boston last year that quite blew me away. The designers from Moshe Safdie Associates described how they worked with the contractors to build the very complex skylight system of the Peabody Art Museum. The skylight looks like a huge wooden ship hull, turned upside down and then curved in plan, maybe 200 meters long. A gorgeous shape, but it looked absolutely indeterminate structurally, a nightmare to document, detail and fabricate.
But the designers, using AutoCAD by the way, had created the shape as an assembly of four pieces each of which had been sliced out of a giant virtual torus. This meant that 90% of the components were repeating identical parts. (Stay with me now, I'm coming on topic...) The skylight fabricators were also at the workshop. They basically took Safdie's computer model and fed the data into their own CAD/CAM system. Apparently they were the only fabricators able to work this way and their bid was by far the lowest, because they were able to understand how simple the thing really was. You can see the other bidders just coming up with some number off the top of their heads and then doubling it, just to be sure.
Ultimately the CADCAM system manufactured each of the skylight components complete with all the odd endcuts and boltholes. When the anchorplates for the skylight were in place they did a 3d laser survey to confirm the actual locations and then made adjustments to the computer model. In the end, the whole thing was fabricated with a margin of error measured in millimeters. No leaks, either.
Now, of course the architect and the fabricators had flatland contract documentation for all this stuff. And there were structural engineers and glazing subcontractors in the mix, as well. But what I thought was cool was that the real work happened in virtual reality and the most critical exchange of information was all digital. The 2d documentation happened in parallel, largely to have a signed legal record of the work.
I think we'll see more and more computer literate builders in the future, who will want to use the virtual model in ways that go way beyond just general 3d visualization, for material take-offs, fabrication and verification. We'll still have flatland paper contract documents, but these will be more like a legal record of what was done, rather than the way information gets passed along.
David Collins
not holding my breath, incidently.
most of the builders I work with can't figure out how their cellphones work
they have to ask the kids
David Collins
Win10 64bit Intel i7 6700 3.40 Ghz, 32 Gb RAM, GeForce RTX 3070
AC 27.0 (4001 INT FULL)