BIM Chapters: Conference Follow Up - Advancing Computational Building Design 2021

Friday, October 8, 2021

Conference Follow Up - Advancing Computational Building Design 2021

This week was a wrap for the 5th annual Advancing Computational Building Design conference hosted by HansonWade. The event was amazing on multiple levels... from IRL people (finally) to networking to session content, and top notch hospitality by the sponsors. This is the topic of today's post.

keep reading to learn more...

I had previously wrote this post about the conference: Advancing Computational Building Design 2021. Also, all the photos below are in chronological order. I took a LOT more photos, but had to narrow them down a lot for this post.

It was an honor to represent Lake|Flato Architects among all the other amazing people and firms present.

The pandemic and an overlap with Autodesk University surely had an impact on overall attendance... which was around 50 people. However, it excelled over other conferences in access to in-depth conversations with like-minded folks, including the presenters.

The Venue

Westin Galleria Dallas. The venue was nice, with the conference space being within the hotel which was attached to a mall with restaurants and a Starbucks... oh, and a giant ice rink pictured below. Since I live in Texas (I-35 connects Dallas & San Antonio) it was not too much trouble to get here.

Day 0 (included optional workshop day)

The first day was an included, but pitched as optional, workshop day. It still had about 85% of the total attendance. I was the chair of this workshop day, and got to kick things off with an introduction to the audience and introduced each speaker.

Of course, the three presenters for the day where there first:) Photo (left to right): Dan Stine (Lake|Flato) , Ryan Cameron (CMBA), Zak Kostura (Arup)

Ryan gave away a copy of Randy Deutsch's book, Superusers during his presentation.

Zak presenting on dashboards developed and used at Arup...

My presentation on next gen VR, including examples of NVIDA boundlessXR (CloudXR) facilitating full Enscape VR delivered across the internet to a wireless Quest 2 HMD over WiFi or 5G (I even shows a 4G example just for fun). Plus I talked about Enscape's recent support for AI-based NVIDIA DLSS.

First evening out with a small group... at the Blue Fish (good sushi).

Day 1

Ryan Cameron was the chair for the rest of the event... he introduced the amazing keynote presentation by Pardis Mirmalek, founder of Desanoia -- an architecture and design technology firm that leverages AI.

A selfie with the keynote speaker, Pardis!

Selfie with Rob (Thornton Tomasetti). Funny, we had a Zoom call two weeks ago and neither of us realized, until the conference, that we were both participating.

First panel...

Identifying the Projects & Applications that Most Easily Demonstrate

Computation ROI & Gain Additional Buy-In

Hilda Espinal (CannonDesign), Rob Otani (Thornton Tomasetti), Elliot Glassman (WSP Built Ecology), Edgar Rodriguez (Mortenson)

Selfie with Hilda...

Italian-style lunch...

Lunch with Michael Hoehn (Burro Happold)... amazing conversation, which included their open source LCA tool (the BHoM), and a mass timber project we are working on together at UPenn.

Selfie with the infamous Bill Allen, whose company EvolveLab was one of the event sponsors!

One of my top five favorite presentations... Hiram Rodriguez (Adrian Smith + Gordan Gill)... next two slides.

Many attendees gathered Tuesday evening at The Star. Although I am not a sports fan, it was an interesting place to see and hangout. Also, thanks to Bill Allen, and EvolveLab, for buying food and drinks for everyone at a nice pizza place there.

Getting to The Star involved people packing into Uber/Lyfts... I shared a ride back with three folks... the two paying (Steve, Ryan companies) were actually staying at a hotel a couple blocks away. So, I walked back to the Westin with Ryan Johnson (CLARKNEXSEN). Fun conversations from cloud computing to AIA 2030 DDx tracking and submitting strategies.

Day Two

Final day... with many more great presentations.

A few presentations were pre-recorded with live Q&A right after... like this one from Azubike Ononye (INFORM studio). Azubike could not see the audience, but in this photo it looks like he and Ryan are making eye contact, lol.

Hilda sharing a few thoughts during Shayer Rahman's presentation... he leads her computation design group at CannonDesign.

Selfie with Steve Danilowicz (Ryan Companies)

Recognizing event sponsors: Applied Software and Torid...

as well as EvolveLab...

I moderated the final slot of the presentation, which was a panel: Benchmarking the Functionality, Ease of Use & Interoperability of Tools to Determine Which You Should Use for Each Task.

Left to right: Matthew Breau (Handel Architects), Michael Hoehn (Buro Happold), Michael Warren (AECOM)

Oh, and after this panel, which concluded the event, I had ten minutes to get up to my hotel room and deliver my Autodesk University session, to 500+ people, on early energy modeling. The main presentation was pre-recorded and then the Q&A part was live!!! It worked out perfectly:)

Pictures shared by Bill Allen...