Georgia Institute of Technology professor Charles M. Eastman, long considered a research guru for computer-based building design and construction, displays parental pride in his latest brainchild: Georgia Tech's Digital Building Laboratory. Unlike Eastman's past efforts, starting some 40 years ago, the fledgling DBL, created in 2009 to help improve building design and construction through the aid of digital tools, is a collaboration among academics and players in the buildings-sector food chain.
“This is industry and academia together,” says Eastman, DBL's director and a professor of both architecture and computing at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. “To me, it is so obvious that we need each other,” he says.