The building industry is divided into two separate, but equally important groups: property owners who make investment decisions and AEC professionals who turn concepts into reality. For the longest time, these disparate factions have relied on one another to drive development, but despite their alignment of goals, challenges arise due to their different languages and scopes of work. At the AEC Hackathon last October in San Francisco, there were a lot of interesting approaches on how to solve problems faced by building industry professionals. One in particular dealt with “hacking the process,” essentially working to develop a framework which encapsulates
Related Links: EarthCam ePlanIt OxBlue Elevated Lens Photography photoSentinal Radiusvision OnsiteView iBEAM Construction Cameras AGC discussion on JobCams 26 Gigapixel image of Paris Jobsite cameras take scheduled photos from static positions and stream them to private users or public websites, stringing together the images as movies of projects going up or to archive for later use. While the cameras are a hit with developers and marketers of high-end residential buildings and flagship projects, they are becoming a general construction staple, written into specs from the start, say users and vendors.Sources also say the range of job-cam uses and paybacks is
Mobility and collaboration tools went from nice-to-have to a must-have technology in 2013, as more owners expected contractors to deploy the smartest use of produtivity tools on jobs and jobsites.This year, more companies — especially contractors and general contractors — opened their wallets to investments in mobility and collaboration tools that help them communicate more quickly on a project, and share documents across far-flung project teams.Research and surveys of contractors and subcontractors highlighted the shift. For example, McGraw Hill Construction found that mobility tools such as tablets and cloud services are yielding investment benefits for contractors and specialty contractors. But
Researchers at the University of Buffalo measure the corrosion level of a steel-cable strand using a non-invasive monitoring technique, aimed to replace structurally invasive manual checking processes for concrete-embedded steel cables on bridges. “Checking post-tension structures for corrosion is a challenging problem,” says Alireza Farhidzadeh, a University of Buffalo PhD candidate in structural engineering. He says projecting the accurate evolution of corrosion to a cable is nearly impossible because of a variables such as the salting of roads during the winter and the rain and snow levels during the year. Structurally invasive corrosion monitoring techniques are required, such as drilling
Related Links: Specifications of UK's BIM Level 2 Mandate Bentley: BIM Also Means Information Mobility Contractors See Gains, Gaps With Growth of Mobility Tools Just a few years ago, "BIM" was just an acronym that meant little to most U.K. construction professionals.Now, building information modeling is the subject of increasingly crowded conferences up and down the country. What made the digital system such a hot topic is a U.K. government mandate saying that, by 2016, collaborative 3D BIM be deployed, with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic, on all centrally funded projects of any value.As a
Image Courtesy of Softkill Design/Sophia Tang ProtoHouse encloses the planes of walls and ceiling of a cantilevered home in a web of filaments algorithmically "grown" to carry the loads. Related Links: Advancing 3D Printing Capabilities Excite Construction Leaders Softkill Design The Softkill Algorithm Moving away from designing for 3D printing that emulates traditional uses of conventional materials, a London-based design group called Softkill Design is experimenting with structures using plant-based "bio-plastic" fibers that are laid down by a 3D printing process called laser "sintering," which fuses together particles by the pinpoint application of heat, rather than chemical bonding agents.Softkill's project
Related Links: ProtoHouse Project Follows Bone-Growth Logic to Design Structure Construction has always been a three-dimensional activity. While the representation of the intent of construction has been liberated "virtually" into 3D digital models and rotatable 3D representations, accurate physical representations of design intent have been achieved, until only recently, either through the artistry and skill of a scale model-builder or by building full-scale mock-ups of the ideas captured by the design documentation.But now 3D digital printing offers a third way to go from intent to reality. Like ink-jet printers, 3D printers deposit fine particles on a surface but then keep
Image Courtesy ICC For the first time in ICC history, anyone can submit a proposal to change the building code from anywhere with Internet access. A new web app from the International Code Council makes voting on changes to the building code available to anyone, for the first time.Since its inception, the International Code Council (ICC) held hearings twice a year where members submit, argue and finalize changes to the coming year’s building code. Only a fraction of the council’s 58,000 members are able to attend the meetings—some of which last 10 days—says Dominic Sims, CEO of ICC.“The app is
Courtesy UC3M ROBINSPECT is an automated version of TunConstruct [pictured]. The latter was a manually controlled robotic scanning method for mapping the interiors of tunnel walls. A newly funded intelligent robotic system for tunnel inspection is slated for testing on several large European jobs as early as next December—well before a working prototype is built. Funders’ confidence is based on a successful manual prototype developed by the same researchers.ROBINSPECT (Robotic System with Intelligent Vision and Control for Tunnel Structural Inspection and Evaluation), is a robot developed by a European consortium of schools, led by Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) and
At Facebook Inc.’s sprawling 57-acre campus in Menlo Park, Calif., construction professionals met with Silicon Valley technologists in mid-November to discover ways to improve the AEC industry, all in one weekend.