You're a bit behind. See http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=1247_0_22_0_C

diabase:

feel free to introduce yourself

I was a CATIA designer for Gehry for 3 years, nearly all of which was on DCH.

Despite the efforts of the spinoff Gehry Technologies, it appears that CATIA V5, despite 13 revisions, has been a great disappointment in the world of Gehry-style architecture. The GT BIM add-on press-released a year ago is apparently months or years away from showtime...

nicke -

can you elaborate a little bit where they've had disappointments with catia? we had jim glymph down here a couple of months ago and i spoke at great lengths with him about the software they were developing. he didn't paint a 'hey, everything is perfect' kind of picture, but it also didn't appear as though they were having the kinds of problems you're implying. i'd love to hear someone in the trenches explain where the shortcomings in the system are.

(btw - he acknowledged a lot of problems with dch - he was much more enthusiastic talking about stata center and how it simplified some things there.)

thanks -

I left Gehry in July 01 just as most of team was transferred to the DCH jobsite in downtown LA. For whatever cultural reason, with very few exceptions, the studio has treated ex-CATIA designers/technicians with a very cold shoulder...of course one obvious reason is that none of us contractors were credentialed architects. (CATIA always has been and may always be first and foremost an aerospace/automotive MCad application) There are only a handful of staff architects remaining with significant V4 experience.

With respect to CATIA V5, here is what a friend wrote me recently:

I still think that V5 is a ways away from being the architectural modeler that V4 is. Having said that, I think that V5 not having Develop will not prove to be much of a barrier for most of the A/E/C world since most of it is geared toward rectilinear designs. I think V5's biggest hurdle will be that hardly anyone actually has experience applying it to architecture, and that includes GT. GT says that they are leveraging their fourteen years of experience developing & innovating this approach to architectural design but what they have really done is abandon those fourteen years of experience by purging the office of anyone with that practical experience and start over with a theory for a direction. I truly wonder how long they will last...


JimG was always the champion of implementing 3d design technology, many years prior to Dennis Shelden, CTO/GT, coming aboard. As for Frank, he has never made a secret of his disdain for computers...!

Has anyone or are there any Colleges that utilize CATIA within there Engineering departments? I have read about seminar type training courses offered but not an actual University that uses CATIA as a tool.

RMIT's (Melbourne, AUST) SIAL (Spatial Information Architecture Lab) runs CATIA under the professorship of Mark Burry (the lead architect for the construction of the Sagrada Familia).

see: http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au/

MIT was also a partner with RMIT - we collaborated on a studio. Not sure if they are still running it though.

At that time we were using Catia V5. Release 8 which was plagued with problems and bugs. There is a release 9 which is far more stable, but I moved on before being able to use it. As far as I saw at Gehry's office, the difference in operability between V4 and V5 was pretty substantial.

I actually dont know the qualitative differences between CATIA and Revit, but the former is notoriously expensive and DASSAULT doesnt pay much if any attention to architects - as stated by nicke, it is principally an engineering tool - apparently the US Navy runs CATIA for its ship design.

Is anyone familiar with a CATIA v. REVIT comparison?

I am a licensed CATIA user with both V4 and V5 available; there are no transferable skills between V4 and V5. I have played with V5 R8 thru R12 and found that 2 of many glaring deficiencies in V5 is the lack of a DEVELOP function for complex surfaces and the lack of a significant structural module.

While obtuse and difficult to learn (as in translated from the French), V4 has quite an array of modules useful in architecture, especially non-rectilinear...

Dassault has been "involved" in Gehry's modeling requirements for at least 10 years, to the extent of providing workstations and licenses, including for V5, and GT is a 'partner' developer, but only GT knows what the actual commitment is.

Still up--"GT and ... Digital Practice in the Building of the MIT Stata Center":

http://www10.aeccafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?section=CorpNews&articleid=123229

My girlfriend's father is a mechanical engineer/designer, primarily in aerospace, aviation, and automobiles. He's also a certified CATIA instructor. He tried to show me a few lessons on the newest revision of V5, and although he proved to me that that software seems capable of just about anything (he was incredible with it), I never practiced enough to get any good at it. Then again, at the time I was doing industrial design instead of architecture, so my tool of choice was Rhino, which is about 1/1000 of the cost, and is a lot simpler to use for a guy like me.

Having said that, 3D is where architecture is going, even more so than it already has.