Welcome to Revit 2021. If you have been using the software for a while you will likely find moments of excitement with some of the new features (yay slanted walls!) while disappointment for a lack of others (search a hashtag or two on Twitter for some good grumbles). There’s a lot of what one would call minor tweaks, and I would say overall this is a good thing. …

“Winning teams, Isiah Thomas decided, always saw themselves as being apart, taking on the rest of the world. If they did not have enemies who were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs, then they invented enemies in order to help push themselves toward their goals.”

- David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps

When the NBA suspended its season last week it likely marked the beginning of the largest non-strike related disruption in the league’s history. Formed after World War II in the richest nation on earth, the NBA has not yet dealt with a societal event of this magnitude. After September 11th, the main issue pro-sports leagues confronted was a need for increased security. The tricky thing for the NBA at this moment –and all other leagues as well — is that the biggest threat to the NBA’s ability to protect its fans is not an outside threat but the fans themselves. …

When I graduated College I had a hard time getting a job in an Architecture firm because my undergrad degree was not “Architecture”. I interviewed with about 25 companies who all told me to go back to school. The only way I was able to get my foot in the door was to tout my knowledge of AutoCAD. Except I didn’t know AutoCAD. I did what many people do and taught myself using Youtube videos and other online resources. There was a lot of great information out there, but it always seemed to overlook one very basic concept that was crucial; HOW DO YOU DRAW A LINE?!? It took me several weeks of troubleshooting and Googling until I finally figured out how to do the most basic of commands in AutoCAD. …

This is not a post telling you to throw out Sketchup and just use Revit. It is not even a post about the promising Autodesk FormIt, Dynamo, or Revit’s In-Place Mass tool — which is often the initial place people go if they are trying to do something conceptual in Revit. Even a Revit expert such as myself uses other software. There are just things different programs do better than others. So just as a graphic designer might use Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator for different purposes, so do I use Revit, Sketchup, Grasshopper via Rhino, and hand sketching. It is not a knock on any particular software, but rather an acknowledgement of how well each one does its primary task. Revit is a powerful tool for documentation. As such, there are elements of it that can be very helpful in exploring the spatial properties of a design using controlled views such as sections and plans. …

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.

― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

In the 850 years the Cathedral of Notre Dame has sat on the banks of the Seine it has undergone numerous desecrations, amendments and repairs; its iconic flying buttresses were invented and added one-hundred years after its initial construction, its sculptures beheaded in the French Revolution while the building was repurposed as a food warehouse and the most recent iteration of its spire a revision undertaken in the 1830s, when on the success of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame popular opinion pushed King Louis Philippe to undertake a massive restoration of the dilapidated building. When Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and his associates began their restoration in 1831, they had no more than archival drawings and engravings to pursue their work with. Using a large team of artisans over a span of a quarter century they restored the Cathedral as best they could, taking creative liberties when certain elements remained unclear.

As the ashes still smolder from the massive fire that consumed much of the cathedral’s roof and the Viollet-le-Duc designed spire, the restorationists tasked with rebuilding this profound masterpiece will have much more precise information to go on than their predecessors. The first step will be examining documentation of the existing conditions prior to the fire. This information is not held in hand drawings but in a digital model made by the late Dr. Andrew Tallon in 2015. Tallon scanned the entire building using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to create a Point Cloud, a 3D model constructed of billions of points that make up a model so dense that one can use them to measure conditions to the ¼ an inch. Using this digital archive of the building, preservationists will be able to see precisely where things were before the fire, down to every crack in the rib vaults. Indeed Dr. …

In the previous two AutoCAD to Revit posts I focused on custom line types and editing families to begin making Revit feel more familiar to AutoCAD users. Assuming you have completed the heavy lifting associated with those posts, now is the time to pull everything together so you don’t have to think about it every time you start Revit. The key is setting up a custom office template. I’m going to go over three crucial steps to ensure a working environment that enables you to create visuals similar to AutoCAD. In a future post we will go more in depth into the nuances of template creation, but this post focuses specifically on the steps needed to create an AutoCAD friendly aesthetic. Plan to start this exercise with the typical out of the box Revit Architecture template. …

Previously in Concrete Conversations….

Amateur Architecture Studio’s Tengtou Pavilion is all about engaging history without pandering to it. In doing so it not only becomes a powerful commentary on the past but evokes a significant fact of the present; we live in a time of amalgamation. This is true of music and art, but likewise of building materials. Example: Oriented Strand Board is one of the most common materials used in low-rise buildings. It is made from the recycled shavings of rare and old growth trees, glued together into uniform boards. The original is magnificent, but the new version creates confusion or plain indifference. …