AEC Tech News (#213)

Managing campus territories with ARCHIBUS.

In the City University of New York’s (CUNY) administrative circle, Deborah Lott is known as the woman who can answer questions about space in a short time. Lott is not an astrophysicist. She’s the associate director of space management at the school’s Space Planning and Capital Budget Department. As the overseer of the 23 individual campuses that make up CUNY’s 26 million square-foot domain, she monitors how each room is used, who’s using it, how many students it can seat, where it’s located, and more.

In September 2005, soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the university’s emergency preparedness team asked her to produce a report listing all the assembly halls within the university system that measure 3,000 square feet or larger and have toilet facilities nearby. She didn’t reach for the rolls of floor plans in the archive. Instead, she ran a few queries in her database and swiftly returned with the report.

“Usually, if someone asks me a question during the kickoff meeting in the morning, I can get back to him or her before the end of the day,” Lott noted.

To access the most up-to-date information about every nook and cranny of the school territory, she relies on ARCHIBUS, an AutoCAD-based software solution for facilities and infrastructure management.
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BIM and Education (1-2-3 Revit Column)

By Rick Rundell, AIA

One of my early articles for this column looked at how building information modeling (BIM) was being integrated in the architectural curriculums of several universities around the world. At that point in time, BIM was still relatively new to architectural education. Today, there is broad adoption and rapid deployment of BIM in most major architectural schools. Why?

IM is a useful tool for teaching about building design, because BIM is more like working on a real-world building project. With BIM, students interact with the whole building design and learn the relationships between design and building. Read more>>

AutoCAD Architecture Test Drives
November 5-16, 2007
Various U.S. Cities
Autodesk-certified experts and industry leading instructors will walk attendees through some of the basic and more advanced functionality in each of Autodesk's latest versions of AutoCAD Architecture, Revit Architecture, Revit Structure, Revit MEP, and Autodesk VIZ. Read more

Using Green Building Studio for Whole Building Energy Analysis
November 9, 2007
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Peter Gehring, director of building solutions at Synergis, will discuss how attendees can use a Web-based energy engineering analysis solution that integrates with today's 3D-CAD/BIM applications. Read more

For Cadalyst's full calendar of events, click here.