Last month, 12,000 building professionals, product designers, BIM managers, and CAD users traveled from around the world to attend Autodesk University (AU), one of the largest technology conventions in the AEC industry. At this annual event, held this year at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas Nov. 18–21, Autodesk debuts new products and highlights trends in design and fabrication. For example, among many tools and workflow enhancements, the software developer unveiled Autodesk Construction Cloud, a platform that connects BIM 360, PlanGrid, BuildingConnected, and Assemble on a network, allowing designers to collaborate across a project life cycle, as well as to share data to a larger project team.
As an architecture professor and researcher attending my third AU, I summarize below highlights from the opening keynote on Nov. 19 and the coinciding AU Expo.
Keynote Design-to-Fabrication Examples
As in past years, the opening keynote on AU's main stage was a theatrical spectacle complete with thumping music, strobes, and super graphics looping on sprawling screens to energize the crowd of thousands. Autodesk president and CEO Andrew Anagnost opened by talking about the future of work, a recurring theme from past AUs. He shared examples in which automation enabled industries to streamline their design-to-fabrication process—using Autodesk tools, of course—and framed these ideas in the context of the environmental impact of a growing population and the inevitability of more “everything ... houses and hotels, automobiles, and airplanes.”
Anagnost described Autodesk’s partnership with New York–based contractor Skystone to deliver the tallest modular hotel in the world. Each of the 168 steel-framed rooms in the forthcoming Marriott hotel, in New York’s NoMad neighborhood, will be factory made and shipped from Poland complete with beds, desks, lights, and bathrooms. Using Revit, the hotel designers created a library of parts that could be mixed and matched. Through the Kit-Connect service on Autodesk’s Forge platform, they published component libraries to the Cloud where the parts could be shared, assembled, and configured into a single model that automatically updated with any changes to related models. Each physical room unit will be craned into place on the tight urban site in a manner that Autodesk says will halve the amount of site work necessary, use less material, and create less waste because of its design, preconstruction, and construction management tools.
Anagnost also announced a second collaboration with Airbus, following their work on the bionic airplane partition wall. The latest project uses Autodesk's Generative Design software to optimize the planning of an entire Airbus factory building in Hamburg, Germany, for daylight, production benchmarks, and travel paths for the manufacture and assembly of airplane wings. In a media briefing following the keynote, David Benjamin, founding principal of The Living, a New York–based Autodesk Studio, described the challenges of the triangular project site, one of the last undeveloped areas of the Airbus campus.
David Benjamin from Autodesk and Bastian Schaefer from Airbus describe the challenges and processes of planning a new Airbus factory, in Hamburg. The duo uses Generative Design to optimize airplane-wing manufacturing spaces. With the parameters quantified, the software created thousands of potential solutions for the site.
Benjamin credited Generative Design for allowing his design team to automate the optimization of multiple parameters while retaining creative agency to understand the trade-offs. “It is mathematically solving a 10-dimensional problem,” he said. “We defined our parameters and were able to explore thousands of good options using artificial intelligence." Construction of the factory starts next year, and the team expects significantly lower operational costs, given the passive strategies like daylight and natural ventilation, and higher building performance, aiming for net-zero energy certification.
Anagnost was joined onstage by Build Change CEO Elizabeth Hausler, who talked about her organization’s use of Autodesk tools for retrofitting post-disaster housing in Colombia and elsewhere. She outlined Build Change’s 15-year history and attested that CAD technology has helped them retrofit projects “where every building is unique and just a little bit different” to create accurate drawings quickly. Newer tools are helping them scale up their work, allowing them to automate certain aspects of the process: “We code the structural engineering retrofit rules in Dynamo, and use Revit to produce a complete design, 3D model, bill of materials, and construction drawings,” she explained. “What once took our team of three people four to five days now takes one person three hours.”
Watch the main stage keynote and the hundreds of classes, case studies, and software downloads presented at Autodesk University here.
In the entertainment and amusement park sectors, Walt Disney Imagineering executive creative director Asa Kalama described how his team used BIM to integrate and share information from more than 600 models from 140 different designers (including artists, interior designers, programmers, prop builders, facility architects, landscape designers, ride engineers, and software developers) for the ambitious Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge experiences at Disney World and Disneyland.
Kalama explained that Disney’s parks and resorts' larger-than-life scale requires dedicated infrastructure, such as its own power plant, water plant, and transportation, equating its projects almost to the scale of urban design. Kalama’s testimony sent the message that automation is not just about saving time or money, but also about helping designers realize their creative ideas and intent while maintaining their ambition.
The Future Is Going to the Dogs
At the AU Expo, attendees previewed the future of robotics in the building industry, tested innovations through real-time visualization, and experienced full-scale generative-design case studies. Equipped with a FARO Lidar scanner capable of taking field measurements and photographing site conditions on his back, Spot the Boston Dynamics robotic dog navigated the show floor in an incredibly believable canine manner. Stretching his back and rolling on the floor, it aimed to disarm any crowd skepticism about automation.
Dutch contractor BAM Infra showcased a robotic arm methodically printing concrete on the Expo showroom floor into precise, formwork-less shapes. The process, a collaboration with materials company Weber Beamix, uses Generative Design to guide material placement, optimized to minimize waste for the desired form and strength. The contractor, known for its design of the first 3D printed structurally pre-stressed concrete bicycle bridge, recently opened a concrete 3D printing factory in the Netherlands and will soon test the technology on another parametrically modeled and 3D-printed concrete bridge in the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Faster, More Realistic Simulations
Several companies demonstrated new rendering software compatible with Autodesk products. At the Unreal Engine booth, attendees switched between daytime and nighttime views in renderings and tested dynamic scenes in different weather or seasons using a new release of Twinmotion. The latest edition works with Autodesk Revit, as well as other developers’ CAD and BIM tools. Game engine company Unity demonstrated several new products, including Unity Reflect, capable of creating real-time BIM visualizations from Revit models and metadata.
With more designers leveraging enhanced simulation tools to understand their building’s performance, these advancements in visualization make the performance and experience more realistic and easier to communicate.
The Power of Play
The abundance of technology on display at AU could overwhelm any architect trying to determine what skills to learn next. It turns out Autodesk has a tool for that as well. “Our challenge is how can we get people to explore and play with new tools in a motivating environment, where you don’t have to go off somewhere to learn, but you can stay productive,” Anagnost explained in the media briefing following his keynote. Gamification of learning can be a powerful motivator, he suggested. Subsequently, Autodesk is developing the Learning Engine, a tool-based platform to help users learn software. It will adapt to what a user already knows and suggest relevant productivity tips and shortcuts similarly to Duolingo’s approach, which Anagnost admired. The Autodesk Learning Engine will incentivize learners by offering microcredentials, a semi-competitive environment, and, most importantly, a place to apply what they learn.
Finally, AU2019 reinforced Autodesk’s continual focus on interoperability and collaboration. By seeking to layer intuitive improvements and add-ons to their own AEC tools as well as those by other developers, Autodesk hopes designers won’t have to stray far from their preferred design environment. The conference also underscored Autodesk’s belief in automation as ideal for eliminating repetitive work and freeing creatives and technologists to focus on more rewarding activities—like collaborating and playing—while learning and designing.
Watch the main stage keynote and the hundreds of classes, case studies, and software downloads presented at Autodesk University here.
