In the midst of the 2020 global pandemic, another semester starts at North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo, ND. This is where I teach a graduate architecture and landscape architecture seminar on Building Information Modeling (BIM). Students have the option of attending in-person, as with most of their other classes, but since I am teaching remotely - from Texas - everyone is connecting individually via Zoom.
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| Fall 2020 Class via Zoom |
I have always taught this class remotely... I guess you could say I was teaching remote before teaching remote was cool:) I wrote about that here: Teaching Remotely - Architecture and Interior Design - Sharing My Experience.
When I lived in Minnesota, I would often drive 5 hours (each way) and attend the first class in-person. Here's a post about last year's first class: NDSU - First Week of School - Fall 2019
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| Photo: Fall 2019 |
We already covered a lot of ground... including simple Revit massing and early energy modeling using Autodesk Insight. The assignment is to create an eight story building using the massing tool, modify it to make the geometry slightly more complex (see first image above), create an energy analysis model (EAM) in Revit and then push that out to Insight.
The final step is to share the cloud-based Insight project with me, after making a few adjustments to the inputs; for example, refining the wall insulation value and adjusting the window-to-wall ratio (WWR). The image below shows all the shared Insight projects currently in my account!
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| Autodesk Insight Shared Projects |
While teaching remote is not ideal. it certainly can work for some classes, and this is one of them. Plus, this is not unlike every project at Lake|Flato Architects, where we are an architecture-only firm and therefore work collaboratively with external consultants on every project.
Fun stuff!
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I also write blog posts for Enscape - a new paradigm in rendering, animation and VR for AEC.
