End of a Chapter - My Last Week at LHB

An amazing opportunity has presented itself and I will be pulling up my stakes and moving my family across the country in the near future. In today's post I will reflect on the my time at LHB and then later this week I will reveal where I am going and talk about the future!

Sneak peak: tune in to this week's The Revit Kid's live YouTube Happy Hour, to hear us talk Enscape, and be the first to hear where I am headed! Learn more about this happy hour tomorrow... including info about free stuff we will be giving away!

Custom Coke bottles from Mike Murphy at Autodesk

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Microsoft Teams Custom Backgrounds and Firm Branding

Since the beginning of the work-from-home orders due to the global pandemic, LHB has been using Microsoft Teams much more intensely for many things, such as:

• Virtual Meetings
• Digital Water-cooler
• Digital Happy Hours
• Pandemic Leadership Organization
• Staff Training
• Live Events (presentations)

Initially, Teams only allowed the background to be blurred out and could show a maximum of four video feeds. Now we have up to 3 x 3 video and can select from a provided list of background images. Today's post shows how you can use custom backgrounds and touches on how LHB's marketing team served up a stack of images for staff to use and help with firm branding!

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Off Topic: DIY Moo Masks by LHB Architect Christopher Wegscheid

Sharing something being done by fellow LHB'er and architect Chris Wegscheid to help out during the current COVID-19 pandemic. He made a DIY video on how to make face masks at home.

Here is description of what Chris is doing, taken from a staff email written by Housing Studio leader Kim Brethim, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C...

"Beginning a few weeks ago we all became aware of the shortage of safety masks for use by first responders, medical care providers, and individuals who are most at risk related to the current medical environment.  In response to some specific challenges being experienced by family and friends of some LHB staff within the housing studio, several individuals took a deep dive into ‘home-crafting’ appropriate mask filters.  Chris Wegscheid, in particular, has gone all in and generated instructions for converting home furnace filters (new) into the ‘MOO-MASK’.  The need for these masks continue."

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Staff Training During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Last week I had the opportunity to deliver staff training, here at LHB, during the COVID-19 pandemic with everyone working from home. Turns out, having a captive audience is highly conducive to favorable attendance! Thus, this is the topic of today's post.

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Past Projects - US Forest Service Kawishiwi Ranger Station

Today I want to shift gears and share a non-COVID-19 #WorkFromHome type post...

When I started working at LHB in 2004 I worked in the Government Studio for two years. I had already written my first Revit textbook (copyright 2003 on Revit 5.0) but LHB did not have Revit installed on any computers just yet. About a year in, I worked with my predecessor, the firm's CAD Administrator, to make the LHB titleblock that the housing group would use on their first Revit projects.

One of the first projects I worked on at LHB, therefore, was done in AutoCAD. I have plenty of experience in AutoCAD, including this book I still update every year: Residential Design Using AutoCAD 2021. LHB still uses AutoCAD (Civil 3D mainly) on all of its horizontal projects; civil, survey, bridge, etc.

The project I want to share today is the Kawishiwi Ranger Station located in Ely, Minnesota for the US Forest Service. The design included retail and office space as well as Apparatus bays for forest fire fighting equipment.

Recognition:

• 2009 US Forest Service Eastern Region Honor Awards – Walk the Talk for Sustainability
• LEED Silver Certified

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Promoting Architecture to High School Students

Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to local high school students about a career in Architecture along with my LHB colleague Caralyn Kieper and Aaron Kelly. We were at Duluth East High School.

The photo below is of Caralyn and Aaron getting the discussion started... of course, a strategic photo to make sure you cannot see the students faces:) The class was a STEM class on Architecture and Engineering. I saw several screens with Autodesk Revit open and there were SkillsUSA and Solidworks posters on the walls.

Several good questions about types of projects we work on and technology... surprisingly, none on how much money we make.

A handful of the students indicated they were interested in architecture. We encouraged them to reach out individually and set up an appointment to job shadow... which is a pretty cool and formal process (meaning they get to spend a few hours in the office and met with various people in various roles).

Extra fun stuff!

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Check out my video-based  courses on ArchSmarter.

I also write blog posts for Enscape - a new paradigm in rendering, animation and VR for AEC.

Digital Built Week - North America 2020 - My Accepted Sessions

After missing the previous two Digital Built Week - North America conferences (2018 and 2019,) I am happy to report I will attending this year in San Diego, California, USA!

Today's post will high light the three sessions I will be presenting. And, just for fun, also include a world map with pins on all the locations I have presented.

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Dell Power Manager

A Dell Systems Engineer on the team that supports LHB's account stopped by our office yesterday and shared a few interesting things with us... it wasn't even a sales pitch as we already had access to everything he covered. In today's post I thought I would share the Dell Power Manager installed on Dell systems. It has a couple features I thought were pretty cool.

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I ♥ Architecture and Interior Design Education

I love teaching, both professionally and academically... I find it very rewarding to share knowledge, as you might guess if you follow this blog. In return I continually learn new things myself, and gain satisfaction from helping others with their professional development. And, as Randy Deutsch exclaimed the other day in this tweet, it is great to receive thanks from students occasionally.

This week and next I will be presenting at the two architecture schools in Minnesota; Dunwoody College of Technology and the University of Minnesota. Today's post is just a quick mention with posts to follow after each event.

Thanks to LHB for supporting education through hiring (paid!) interns, attending career fairs, hosting student visits, and accommodating staff who wish to teach like myself (NDSU), Miguel Proa (Dunwoody), Casey Goldberg (UofM-Duluth).

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A Virtual Street Reconstruction Project Comes to Life

A quick post to share a rendered image I created, as part of a public VR experience for an urban street renewal project, that made it onto the company calendar juxtaposed the completed project.

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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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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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Top 2019 Posts

As the year comes to a close I thought I would write a short post on the top five posts of 2019 and mention a few of my favorites...

Before the top 5, here are a few of my personal favorites:

• In Memory of César Pelli, July 22, 2019
• Sustainable Design Starts with You!, December 26, 2019
• Off Topic: 360 Video of my Bike Ride Home from Work, August 23, 2019
• Off Topic - My New Urban Chicken Coop, January 28, 2019

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AIA Minnesota Convention 2019 Recap

The annual Minnesota Conference on Architecture, hosted by the Minnesota chapter of the American Institute of Architects, is now behind us. I was honored to present for a fourth year in a row on efforts I am engaged in here at LHB. Today I will share a recap of that event. Perhaps this post will entice you to attend this prestigious event in the Mid-West next year!

"Minnesota AIA is one of my favorites - more like a national conference than a state conference" Randy Deutsch AIA, LEED AP - Architect, Author, Educator, Speaker

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Minnesota Conference on Architecture - Next Week!

Next week is the annual Minnesota Conference on Architecture hosted by the Minnesota American  Institute of Architects. I am participating in two presentations, and I would like to share the session details with you in today's post...

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AIA MN 2019 Convention - Design Technology Panel

In about seven weeks I will be participating in two sessions at the Minnesota Conference on Architecture - A'19 MN hosted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Today I want to share some details on one of them... which is a panel discussion around new tech in AEC.

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Virtual Reality at Vision Northland Groundbreaking

Yesterday I had the opportunity to deliver virtual reality at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new hospital project LHB is involved in with lead design firm EwingCole. The $800 million dollar project is for Essentia Health, called Vision Northland, and replaces the hospital where I was born!

Read on to learn more...

NDSU 2nd Yr Arch visits LHB

Last week LHB hosted 60 second-year architecture students from North Dakota State University (NDSU), again...

Today's post recaps this super fun activity!

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Virtual Project Tours of Real Projects

I have been wanting to use our 360 Photosphere camera to create a virtual tour of a project. We finally did just that last week for a project in construction; Hermantown Essentia YMCA Wellness Center. The  local Chamber of Commerce held an open house last night and attendees got to get in the project and safely view it without actually going to the site. We already did Virtual Reality, and now that the project is under construction, we wanted to present something new.

Another interesting thing about this project is how we used ElumTools to do specialized daylighting calculations to comply with Minnesota's B3 program (similar to LEED). The image below shows the favorable results; solatubes fully lighting the interior space with just daylight!

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'Tis the Season for Training!

As we roll into summer, the construction season shifts to full throttle... especially in our colder climates where such work is more difficult/costly in the  winter months. I was doing Revit training this week with two new hires at LHB, and they agreed to let me share...

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