Archinect - Bergin @ Berkeley

History of BIM

2012-12-02T21:28:00-05:00

The History of BIM (Building Information Modeling)

I recently gave a call for assistance for a research paper that I have been developing off and on for the last year. The full article is available at History of BIM | Architecture Research Lab. If you have input, wisdom or suggestions for the article, comments are highly appreciated.

The Beginnings
The conceptual underpinnings of the BIM system go back to the earliest days of computing. As early as 1962, Douglas C. Englebart gives us an uncanny vision of the future architect in his paper Augmenting Human Intellect.

"the architect next begins to enter a series of specifications and data--a six-inch slab floor, twelve-inch concrete walls eight feet high within the excavation, and so on. When he has finished, the revised scene appears on the screen. A structure is taking shape. He examines it, adjusts it... These lists grow into an evermore-detailed, interlinked structure, which represents the maturing thought behind the a...

// Vertical Cities Asia

2012-09-05T21:53:00-04:00

Vertical Cities Asia - Spring 2011

Courtyard of the Forbidden City - Beijing

Shanghai World Financial Center - Pudong, Shanghai

The site for the competition ... envision a city of 100,000. This was at the furthest edge of the voracious development in the city of Chengdu. Infant skyscrapers sit less than 1000 ft from where this photo was taken, a linseed farm 20 miles from the center of the city, at the seventh ring road.

The Old City of Chengdu strives to retain the history and building methods of the past, new developments like this, spring up alongside preserved relics. The humid fragrant air of Chengdu seems imparted in the buildings and streets and the chemical 'fog' that is subsidized by the emmissions one of China's most car-centered cities, and heavy industry in the North-East of the city.

And the heavily polluted Southern portion of the city experienced an incredible surge in industry as major players sprouted a new technology sector.

Working un...

// Architectural LOLCATS

2012-04-01T19:48:00-04:00

On a lighter note, some of the thesis students here at Wurster Hall went stir crazy over Spring Break and have been developing a trove of Architectural LOLCATS. You are welcome to join us and submit your own Architectural LOLCAT at the following tumblr page, and suggest your own captions!

Maru gets stuck in the Philip Johnson's Glass House

Le Kittenusier'

The Birds Nest by Purrzog and deMeowron

Office for Meow Architecture (OMA) Seattle Kitten Library

Paul Rudolph's brutal Cat and Architecture Building at Yale

Catteus Woods - Catnip Free Zone 1990

Archigram's - Walking Kitty

Mies Van der Meow strikes again

St Marys Cats - Tokyo

SANAA Kitty Box

The Classic Falling Kittens

Mario Botta's SF MeOwMA

Institute of Catemporary Art - Diller, Scofidio and Renfro

The Purrrrr Building - Diller, Scofidio and Renfro

Wurster Scratching Post, our home sweet home

Libeskitten finds out the hard way.

Kittens Pavillio...

// Trends in Generative Design

2012-03-31T20:38:00-04:00

I have been researching optimization methods in architecture and I was delighted to learn about a few high profile projects that have utilized some fantastic algorithms to assist in the realization of complex forms.

Multi-Objective Optimization or Multi-Criteria Design Optimization (MCDA) software has been developed primarily for and by industrial engineers to design airplanes, automobiles, high speed trains and appliances. Process Integrated Design Optimization is another name for the field. The idea of optimization in architecture has been around since nearly the beginning of CAD in the 1950s and 60s, but had been limited by the power of computers and the huge number of variables so it has not yet achieved a critical mass of proponents. The drive towards BIM technology has been justified in part because of benefits that result from having a digital representation of the building to develop performance simulations.

Designers who work with MCDA craft search spaces, and guid...

// Blogs - The New Manifestoes?

2012-03-22T20:21:00-04:00

image : Philip Dujardin/Domus

Coming to you live from the 10th floor of Wurster Hall in beautiful Berkeley, California tonight the Monographs and Manifestos seminar will be broadcast in streaming video with chatroom. We invite you to take a look at our blog - with some bloglike ramblings concerning blogs in the context of architectural discourse -

www.newmanifestoes.blogspot.com

Tonight - 45 minutes from now (my - how blogs can travel fast)

from 6:00 to 9:00 PM PST

Live streaming is available at

- http://tinychat.com/gmis6

Hope to see some of you there!

// Studio ONE Symposium Review

2012-02-14T04:40:00-05:00

An incredible symposium this weekend at Berkeley, the inaugural Studio One Symposium organized by Prof. Nicholas deMonchaux. The event was broken up into two days, first an evening lecture by Mark Smout of S mout Allen known for their 'Retreating Village' project with seductive mechanical models of structures that shrink away from rising tides in a global warming context.

The line-up was incredibly relevant, from Smout's fantastical ecology conscious proposals and visually stunning student work to Geoff Manaugh's of BLDG Blog's insightful and playful opinion to Liam Young's Unknown Fields and research at the AA into just about everything.

The symposium was structured with an hour long lecture followed by a brief response. The response to Mark Smout's work from Richard Walker, Professor of Geography at Berkeley was somewhat hostile. He claims that though the images were beautiful and captivating, that the projects are reductionist and do not present realistic solutions to in...

// STUDIO ONE Symposium

2012-02-02T19:11:00-05:00

from the symposium website...

"The Inaugural Studio One Symposium will be held February 10-11, 2012. Focusing on the studio's themes of architectural agency at an ecological and infrastrucutral scale, the symposium will bring together a global roster of influential designers and thinkers for two days of design, discussion, and debate.

MORE ON STUDIO ONE
To paraphrase Bill McKibben’s 1985 description of New York, the San Francisco Bay has as much to do with nature as a cow has to do with Cool-Whip. Instead of “nature” per se, the bay is a complex assemblage of manifold systems, few of them classically natural, and yet all of them, often invisibly, contributing to our own, architectural occupation of the landscape. However – as with the cool-whip – our own desires for landscapes like the bay would too-often submerge these manifold relationships in favor of something that looks exactly like “nature,” while actually being nothing of the kind.

From the effects of hydraulic mi...

// Multi-Objective Design Optimization

2011-11-30T13:11:21-05:00

Working within a parametric interface with a genetic algorithm solver has been a real treat over the past year, thanks to Galapagos. The integration of simulation engines with the parametric interface has enabled much discovery and introspection into the possibilities that such a workflow could enable. Here is a test that I did last month generating an optimal solar envelope for a high rise building that maintained the volume, area and height of the initial volume within a given solution space.

Now integrating structural analysis tools and energy simulation as a component of my thesis project. If you're still in the academic world, I hope you have a great remainder of the semester as things kick into high gear.

// Occupy Cal

2011-11-18T14:58:17-05:00

Last night, Berkeley CED Students set up camp in sovereign air space in response to the brutal police action last week against non-violent protesters. The cost of tuition continues to rise at UC and there have been a series of actions in solidarity with the Occupy movement and in response to the UC regents meeting to discuss an additional raise in fees and tuition.

The cost of a UC education has doubled over the past 10 years.

http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/15/live-blog-nov-15-day-of-action/ - DailyCal

// Jordi Truco Studio

2011-11-15T12:35:52-05:00

Awesome tests done by Anthony Gianinni and Pablo Zunzunegui in the Jordi Truco studio next door... interactive adaptive components driven by sensors. These are two unit tests for an aggregated structure that will be built at the end of the semester. They are using Arduino and Firefly for the interaction and movement.

Non-Functional Prototype

Actuation Test - 2 Modules

// Post Industrial Latent Space

2011-07-28T14:25:13-04:00

Bryan Allen just returned from visiting the ruins of Chernobyl, follow his intriguing explorations of 'Post Industrial Latent Space' at his blog, updated frequently with great pictures.

Bryan is one of two winners of the Branner Fellowship given by the UC Berkeley CED in 2010, the 2011 winners will be announced next month. The fellowship is given to two or three M. Arch students each year and provides a generous stipend to travel the world for 12 months while researching a topic for their thesis.

From Bryan's blog :

To continue the exponential expansion of the past is no longer reasonable, responsible, or feasible. Terra incognita is a memory. Post-Industrial Latent Space presents it's counterpoint: the urbis incognita--hidden, forgotten, and ignored ‘wilderness’ of the city inviting exploration and temporary inhabitation. It is present in the hidden, forgotten, illegal, appropriated, and ignored contextual spaces we see every day. This new frontier sits quietly waiting to be e...

// M. Arch Thesis 2011

2011-04-28T19:08:54-04:00

Beautiful thesis projects abound at the presentations last Friday... a busy semester coming to a close giving way to a promising Summer and a formal beginning of my own thesis. My work this semester has focused on becoming literate in various scripting languages and diving deeper into the possibilities enabled by Building Information Modeling, parametric softwares and simulation tools to assist and enhance the quality of design. Themes in the thesis projects ranged from bio-remediation and adaptive re-use of neglected spaces, utilization of infrastructural space such as the spandrels beneath bridges and adaptive or customizable architecture that imitates infrastructure. A group research thesis designed community oriented housing for the rapidly urbanizing Tianjin, China.

Ileana Acevado's 'Extreme Modalities' analyzes and presents possible utilizations of space under an Emeryville highway, striving to create an architectural procession while preserving the unique skating/vagrant c...

// Spring Lecture Poster

2011-01-31T12:58:46-05:00

My studio is taking part in the Vertical Cities Asia competition this semester. This competition asks us to design a city for 100,000 on a 1km by 1km space in Chengdu, China... an industrial city in central China with a population near 12 million. This rapidly urbanizing area poses a great set of challenges and opportunities for developing architecture and planning that can contribute to the greater good of a community, and perform functions outside of the domain of traditional architecture.

The schools involved in the competition are :

The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Tongji University
Tsinghua University
University of Tokyo
National University of Singapore
Delfi University of Technology
ETH Zurich
University of California at Berkeley
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania

We are excited to be traveling to Chengdu in March as a class to document the site and have a good time in China. If you are involved in any of these teams and would like to meet up wi...

// 2010 Retrospective

2010-12-31T13:35:41-05:00

During my first semester at Berkeley (M. Arch Option 2), I learned a great deal about the program that I would like to share with you.

Berkeley is undergoing a shift of thought that makes it difficult to pin down exactly what the school's pedagogical aims may be. The new chair of the architecture program, Tom Buresh, has an omnipresence that shows promise for consolidating the diverse agendas of the faculty. The incoming M. Arch Option 2 students were made to take part in a comprehensive studio (the first time this was mandatory). The three studios were taught by Roddy Creedon, Jill Stoner and Tom Buresh’s partner, Danelle Guthrie. I chose Guthrie’s studio in part to get a feel for what direction Berkeley may be heading in my time here. Our site turned out to be a barren site adjacent to a grain mill in post-industrial Petaluma, California. The program was a live/work arrangement that focused on the production of ‘goods’, and however one would interpret the idea of ‘goods’.

I pr...

// Californication

2010-08-02T03:39:45-04:00

Since my last post I've found a house in Berkeley. This weekend we unloaded the POD into the new house and threw a small party to celebrate that achievement. I met and re-acquainted myself with some of the Option III students who are taking the Summer Program, they are all very promising and I'm becoming more excited by the day for the semester to begin.

Finding a place to live was an incredible task, with hundreds of houses/apartments added to Craigslist daily coupled with the intense competition to secure a place in town, we had no less than 3 places we thought were a done deal before we actually signed a lease. I am happy to report that the search paid off, we found an incredible house with a serene garden fenced off from the street. I have a fireplace that I'm actually going to have to use to heat the house and learning how to make a good fire is high on my list of priorities. We also have a jacuzzi tub...

We studied the neighborhoods of Berkeley thoroughly before choosing a...

// Manifest Destiny

2010-06-27T02:31:08-04:00

Since my last post, I've become a resident of California, let me tell you a little about what that's like.

I live in Aliso Viejo. It's a planned community that was incorporated 20 years ago from Laguna Beach. I'm 3 miles from the Pacific and it's all nature preserve from here to there, you can hike out in a little more than 2 hours through the ridge trail of the Laguna Canyon. This coupled with the beautiful weather have offered me plenty of reasons to stay outside and I have been feeling great exploring the outdoors in my free time.

Alexanne, my other, is doing the Summer InArch program at Berkeley for the Summer while I am working at a great healthcare architecture firm in Newport Beach. I have a dog with me and his name is Fox. When I left Virginia, we put everything we owned inside of a POD and sent it off to Berkeley. Because of that, everything I have in this house was brought in the backseat of 'Volvy' the grey Volvo. Until this morning I had with me a few pots and pans, ...

// Hello

2010-05-03T15:34:26-04:00

Please hold on, please set luggage cart break to on. (SFO)

T-27 days until I leave Virginia, I thought I would get a jump on the school blog. The past two months have been a whirlwind of travel and exploration, visiting potential grad schools, job interviews, a wedding, a funeral, goodbyes, hellos. Finally it is all settling down before Alexandra (My Other) and Fox (Our Dog) and I, hit the road for a 3000 mile trek.

About Me :

I had a tumultous undergraduate experience resulting in attending four different schools for various lengths of time and hopping majors from Law to Psychology to Art to Art History and finally, to Architecture. I have retained an interest in all of these fields and maintain that they are all integral parts of a solid design education. I ended up graduating in 2008 from UMass Amherst with a BFA in Design.

After undergrad, I found a job with a mid-sized firm in Southeastern Virginia formerly known as CMSS Architects. I started working the day Lehman Brothe...