Buro Happold at Autodesk University

Autodesk University, one of the AEC industry’s premier events, is a chance for Buro Happold to both share and absorb the best technological practices in our industry.

This year there was an intangible energy surrounding coding, virtual reality and augmented reality technology for AEC.

We’ve known that modelling projects in Revit has been the way to go for years. However, four years ago Dynamo came onto the scene as one of the first automation plug-ins to Revit. Dynamo was built using terms that we as engineers had grown accustomed to in Revit: parameters, categories and element IDs. All things considered, it was a fairly intuitive way for us to start taking computation more seriously as a practice. However, using visual programming platforms like Dynamo and Grasshopper for tedious, time consuming tasks is now the standard of care for most AEC firms.

The topic of the next technological leap into using C# coding was omnipresent at Autodesk University 2018. Additionally, there was an emphasis on the exploration of the ways that VR and AR technology will take our detailed, curated Revit models and bring them to life during the design stage to give us foresight into the construction stage.

The week at Autodesk University kicked off with an all-day “Computational BIM” workshop, where we spent the day hacking out Dynamo from Visual Studio and GitHub using C#. We learned to use C# for Revit plug-ins, Dynamo view extensions, Dynamo custom nodes, and controlling Dynamo from the web.

Buro Happold then gave three presentations, “Napoleon Dynamo” (creating computational culture), “Dynamo for Schematic Design” and “Risks and Rewards of IPD” which was centered around this year’s AU AEC excellence winner, Brown University’s New Engineering Research Center. We also participated in the “Hack the Stadium” design slam, where participants created a stadium design in 20 minutes in an E-Sports arena atmosphere.

Buro Happold was also invited to take part in and moderate a roundtable discussion on “Collaboration in Construction,” a talk centered around our recent project successes – Museum of the Future in Dubai and the Engineering Research Center at Brown University.

It is incredibly rewarding to see the progress that our industry continues to make year after year, and Buro Happold is honored to share the work that we do with our 10,000 colleagues at Autodesk University. We look forward to learning what’s on the technological horizon for next year and years to come.