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Automation in Construction: Special Issue CAAD futures 2005
Automation in Construction 16 (2007) 1 www.elsevier.com/locate/autcon
Editorial
Automation in Construction: Special Issue CAAD futures 2005 Papers in this issue are by authors who presented their research at the 2005 CAAD Futures Conference. This is a biennial Conference that aims to promote the advancement of Computer Aided Architectural Design and thereby the quality of the built environment. The conferences are organised under the auspices of the CAAD Futures Foundation.1 The series of conferences started in 1985 in Delft, and has since travelled to Eindhoven, Boston, Zurich, Pittsburgh, Singapore, Munich, Atlanta and Tainan. The conference showed that CAAD continues to be a particularly dynamic field of research and development that is evolving on many fronts. CAAD tools have become ubiquitous for all professionals in the design disciplines. At the same time, techniques and tools from other fields and uses are entering the field of architectural design, and applications and ideas are consequently being refined and extended. The Vienna University of Technology hosted CAAD Futures 2005. Following the conference papers were invited from selected authors. The papers selected were chosen on the basis that they presented rigorous, high-quality research and up-to-date developments that were of particular interest to the readers of Automation in Construction. The two decades of CAAD Futures conferences can be regarded as representing a quest for informed new developments by bLearning from the PastQ and this is a particular theme that the authors were invited to address. As a consequence this Special Issue contains a selection of papers, that point towards the future, but are based on a thorough understanding of the past and present. In the papers the authors have presented new work, recent developments and new ideas related to their conference presentation. The authorship has also been augmented in some cases. The papers in this issue can be divided, broadly into two areas: ! Building Information Modelling and Construction Management. ! Knowledge Based Design and Generative Systems. The first five papers deal with issues related to Building Information Modelling and Construction Management. The second set of five papers address research into Knowledge Based Design and Generative Systems. However there are 1
Information on the CAAD Futures Foundation and its conferences can be found at: http://www.caadfutures.org. 0926-5805/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.autcon.2005.10.002
cross-cutting contemporary themes that are evident in a range of papers. For instance the issue of collaboration in design and construction is a thread that runs through papers such as Plume et. al., Rosenmann et. al. and Caneparo. We also note below additional current research and development themes that the papers in this issue, and CAAD Futures papers more generally, reflect. The papers deal with a range of scales, from the Urban to the Building or part of a building, but the themes mentioned below indicate that certain areas of interest are attracting research interest from a broad spectrum of researchers. What was evident from the CAAD Futures event is that Building Information Modelling is increasingly evident in CAAD software developments, in practice, and, it follows, as a research interest. It is also the case that both the capability and usefulness of CAAD software are being enhanced by data rich models working in tandem with increasingly sophisticated data structures. Data is not becoming richer solely in terms of building model information, but also in terms of building performance. Simulations of performance, such as environmental and structural performance, are becoming more advanced and visualisation techniques are aiding the clarity of presentation and understanding of the performance data. Computational techniques are therefore becoming used increasingly as an aid to design refinement and as a design aid, leading to more optimal design solutions. Finally we should note that information exchange impinges on many of the papers as an important issue. This applies to information exchanged locally, or across the Internet, and to information exchanged as a synchronous operation and as an asynchronous operation. The refinement of techniques to enable effective interchange is a concern to many in the field and that is reflected in the papers here. We should conclude by thanking all of the authors specially selected for this issue for delivering a set of papers that we feel describe a range of particularly interesting and important developments. Bob Martens Vienna University of Technology, Austria E-mail address: [email protected]. Corresponding author. Andre Brown University of Liverpool, UK E-mail address: [email protected].
Editorial
Automation in Construction: Special Issue CAAD futures 2005 Papers in this issue are by authors who presented their research at the 2005 CAAD Futures Conference. This is a biennial Conference that aims to promote the advancement of Computer Aided Architectural Design and thereby the quality of the built environment. The conferences are organised under the auspices of the CAAD Futures Foundation.1 The series of conferences started in 1985 in Delft, and has since travelled to Eindhoven, Boston, Zurich, Pittsburgh, Singapore, Munich, Atlanta and Tainan. The conference showed that CAAD continues to be a particularly dynamic field of research and development that is evolving on many fronts. CAAD tools have become ubiquitous for all professionals in the design disciplines. At the same time, techniques and tools from other fields and uses are entering the field of architectural design, and applications and ideas are consequently being refined and extended. The Vienna University of Technology hosted CAAD Futures 2005. Following the conference papers were invited from selected authors. The papers selected were chosen on the basis that they presented rigorous, high-quality research and up-to-date developments that were of particular interest to the readers of Automation in Construction. The two decades of CAAD Futures conferences can be regarded as representing a quest for informed new developments by bLearning from the PastQ and this is a particular theme that the authors were invited to address. As a consequence this Special Issue contains a selection of papers, that point towards the future, but are based on a thorough understanding of the past and present. In the papers the authors have presented new work, recent developments and new ideas related to their conference presentation. The authorship has also been augmented in some cases. The papers in this issue can be divided, broadly into two areas: ! Building Information Modelling and Construction Management. ! Knowledge Based Design and Generative Systems. The first five papers deal with issues related to Building Information Modelling and Construction Management. The second set of five papers address research into Knowledge Based Design and Generative Systems. However there are 1
Information on the CAAD Futures Foundation and its conferences can be found at: http://www.caadfutures.org. 0926-5805/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.autcon.2005.10.002
cross-cutting contemporary themes that are evident in a range of papers. For instance the issue of collaboration in design and construction is a thread that runs through papers such as Plume et. al., Rosenmann et. al. and Caneparo. We also note below additional current research and development themes that the papers in this issue, and CAAD Futures papers more generally, reflect. The papers deal with a range of scales, from the Urban to the Building or part of a building, but the themes mentioned below indicate that certain areas of interest are attracting research interest from a broad spectrum of researchers. What was evident from the CAAD Futures event is that Building Information Modelling is increasingly evident in CAAD software developments, in practice, and, it follows, as a research interest. It is also the case that both the capability and usefulness of CAAD software are being enhanced by data rich models working in tandem with increasingly sophisticated data structures. Data is not becoming richer solely in terms of building model information, but also in terms of building performance. Simulations of performance, such as environmental and structural performance, are becoming more advanced and visualisation techniques are aiding the clarity of presentation and understanding of the performance data. Computational techniques are therefore becoming used increasingly as an aid to design refinement and as a design aid, leading to more optimal design solutions. Finally we should note that information exchange impinges on many of the papers as an important issue. This applies to information exchanged locally, or across the Internet, and to information exchanged as a synchronous operation and as an asynchronous operation. The refinement of techniques to enable effective interchange is a concern to many in the field and that is reflected in the papers here. We should conclude by thanking all of the authors specially selected for this issue for delivering a set of papers that we feel describe a range of particularly interesting and important developments. Bob Martens Vienna University of Technology, Austria E-mail address: [email protected]. Corresponding author. Andre Brown University of Liverpool, UK E-mail address: [email protected].