2019-20 ACEC/MN Engineering Excellence Awards

An LHB project I initiated back in 2011 recently won an ACEC of Minnesota Honor Award. The project, which is a bit unusual for this type of an award, is the MEP Productivity Pack for Autodesk Revit. We submitted for the award with our fellow ACEC-firm-member and technical partner Gausman and Moore (G&M).

This past Friday evening (2020-01-24) a few folks from both teams attended the 53rd Annual ACEC/MN Engineering Excellence Awards event in Minneapolis, MN. I am pictured below with my "partner in crime" Blake Guither from G&M.

Last year, LHB won a Grand Award and the Peoples Choice Award for the The Promenade of Wayzata, located in Wayzata, MN.

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Understanding polar curves of luminous intensity

The professional lighting add-in for Revit, ElumTools, has some cool new features I plan to cover in future blog posts, things like projected points onto irregular surfaces like grade and mass elements, as well as their implementation of horticulture tools from their standalone tool AGI32.

My friends over at Lighting Analysts, Inc (LAI) created a video a while back that does a great job at describing polar displays of light intensity for Type C photometry...

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Revit Shortcuts and Hotkeys Guide by Autodesk

Not the most exciting post today, but I recently came across a document, created by Autodesk, listing all the keyboard shortcuts in Revit. Sharing that in today's post...

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Internal Origin Hide-ifier by Parallax Team

With the Revit 2020.2 update, there is a scenario where the newly exposed Internal Origin will be visible. Although it cannot be selected and does not print, it can be distracting or annoying. To alleviate the pain, our good friends at Parallax Team, Aaron Maller and John Pierson.

First, here is how the issue manifests itself... when you open a project in 2020.2, it adds the subcategory to the project – no mater what version you are coming from – the difference is that if you skip the 2020 or 2020.1 versions with the model, then the internal origin will automatically be turned off in all views (so your views don’t change) – If you did open the project in 2020 or 2020.1 (and upgraded it using those versions) and then you open the model in 2020.2, you will see the internal origin in your views.  Unfortunately, this was unavoidable to get the feature into 2020.2 because the only way to turn it off in all the views was during an upgrade – which we can do during an upgrade using 2020.2, but because the file format doesn’t change between 2020, 2020.1 and 2020.2, if you already opened the project in an earlier version, the upgrade already happened and thus it cannot upgrade the model again in 2020.2.

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AIA Guides for Equitable Practice - Compensation

As an instructor and someone who has trained and supervised interns in the AEC space, I have had the opportunity to talk and think about compensation a lot over the years. So, over the weekend I took some time and read the compensation chapter from the American Institute of Architects' Guides for Equitable Practice. The document contains information that everyone in our industry should read and be generally familiar with; especially AIA members like myself.

I know a lot of students follow this blog, because I reference it in my Revit and AutoCAD textbooks which are used in schools across North America. I think this information will be helpful for them as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Today's post makes a few observations and provides a link to this guide.

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Webinar - Reducing Embodied Carbon with EC3 and Tally

Interested in embodied carbon and life cycle assessment (LCA) as it pertains to architectural design? Be sure to check out a webinar this week (January 16, 2020) on the new feature/workflow which allows Tally to export data to EC3...

Don't know what Tally or EC3 are, keep reading to learn more...

Tour of Vancouver House - Designed by BIG

This past November, LHB’s CEO Rick Carter and Design Technology Manager Dan Stine (that's me) had the opportunity to tour the Vancouver House in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The project was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) from Denmark; click here to learn more about this project on their website.

I wrote a blog post about this amazing project tour for the LHB Blog. And our equally amazing tour guide provided a write-up on the project and the HVAC system his company designed for the project.

In today's post I will tell you about the ironic twists leading up to this project tour, provide an overview of the HVAC system written by our tour guide, and provide the link to the LHB blog post.

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