garethace
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Know any other projects they have done, that you like Paul? Not as big as Croker….
Should be an interesting talk about Croker, after the event so to speak, if nothing else.
Not many projects I would think go on as long as that… wonder who will get Landsdowne Road? 🙂
What an amazing and exciting time to be
“in the field.â€Land XML
The idea of sharing civil data between
applications has been a dream for many
years, and LandXML is increasingly becoming
the answer to that need. LandXML files
provide a format for storing points, surfaces,
alignments, parcels, pipe runs, and roadway
models. Any civil/survey software developer
can now develop the code to read and write
these files, thereby easily sharing these
types of data.The following extract from another article in the Sept/Oct 2003 issue of AUGI world magazine sounds quite familiar actually to how Architects can sometimes prolong a design stage, or feasability stage in CAD, for ages, literally.
Part of our civil engineering solution is a
product called Autodesk Envision 8, which
allows the user to present land development
plans to clients and reviewers in
terms they understand.Autodesk Envision
allows the planner to bring in all the different
data types from CAD to engineering
data to GIS information to imagery and
put it into one solid model, what I call a 3D
model of existing conditions. You can take
the imagery, for example, and drape it over
the terrain model; you can bring in some
preliminary design information—from
roads to houses to parcels—and display it.You can show the model from any perspective
to show people what it will look
like from their view, not just yours. You get
an engineering accurate model but have
not wasted hours and hours to do it.Time at this point in the project is critical as you
are not sure if the plan is viable and costs
are tight. Envision allows you to communicate
and show the plan and let people suggest
changes and collaborate to buy into
the concept.I found this particular quote revealing too, about the gap that currently can exist in large government planning/engineering departments who use ERSI or AUtoCAD etc:
One example is
the City of Seattle. The City of Seattle is integrating
many of its departments, which traditionally
have been silos where GIS was one
group, survey was one group, and engineering
was one group. Even though the departments
were individually very efficient, when
they had to pass information from one
department to another, it was another story.
They spent more time doing data conversion
than they spent on design work.
By having software tools for each phase
of the project lifecycle, with the ability for
each to work off the same information
from any source, you can link in all the various
players on a project, creating a more
efficient way to get the project done. It
allows you to get the right data to the right
people at the right time, resulting in a better
and more predictable delivery schedule
and a better bottom line. And in the end
what you get is a very happy client—all
because more time was spent with them
and their design than on converting data.I honestly have to wonder, in my own mind, how much of the above could have been also true with LUAS?
Thread I found here at Cyburbia about a very similar topic.
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?p=129920#post129920
I enjoyed circum navigating the city centre today on bike, it was interesting to see places like Constitution hill and Western Way, Black Church etc, normally deserted places…. with the same kind of atmosphere as a point-to-point race meeting or country fair, down the country somewhere.
I was just thinking, it would have been a nice exercise today, to just have carried a camera with me to shoot this scenes, which for the other 364 days of the year, wouldn’t ever happen.
thanx, I appreciate that stat, it is nice to have things like that on the tip of one’s toungue. 🙂
I wonder how Temple Bar woulf fair out in terms of handbags too, or Trinity grounds in terms of bicycle vandalism etc, etc.
Another place where you cannot leave a bike now either, is at the quiet end of fishamble/essex st, near Wood Quay civic offices.
I enjoyed circum navigating the city centre today on bike, it was interesting to see places like Constitution hill and Western Way, Black Church etc, normally deserted places…. with the same kind of atmosphere as a point-to-point race meeting, a County Final or a country fair, down the country somewhere.
Mind you, I don’t like the Dublin city maranthon as much, since I witnessed an awful load of shop lifting and general abuse given to shop owners etc, etc around the city centre, by little gouriers.
The city centre is a place I would avoid on Marathon day, especially grafton st.
Top Ten Planning Issues of 2003 as per Planetizen online magazine.
California biased perhaps, where the magazine is located.
For anyone who is interested, 10 years ago, Linux Journal held this interview with Linus:
When I was in the
field in 1982, the
firm I was working
for had just
acquired the state-of-the-art technology, a
total station that essentially combined a
theodolite and a distance meter into one
instrument. The party chief had a handheld
HP calculator that could do an
incredible new task—perform inversing
calculations in the field. The survey manager
sat inside and calculated traverse closures
on a Monroe desktop calculator with
a big handle on the side. We plotted the
survey points on paper with a circular compass,
and a scale, then we interpolated
contours with a plastic strip marked with
little equally spaced lines and drew them
on the plan by hand.From an article in the Jan/Feb PDF issue of AUGI world,
http://www.augi.com/publications/default.asp
Registration is free.
Just thought you might be interested.
The most critical factor in this experiment, is not to use ordinary cold water, since then the experiment doesn’t make nearly the same impact upon you as spilling Bewley’s scalding hot tea/coffee all over yourself.
I mean, Bewleys give you two cardboard cups – one inside the other…. in that way, you can be assured of scalding hot water…. and it makes you ‘extra’ mad when people spill it on you. If it was cold water it would be like rain, and we are just too used to getting soaked with cold fresh rain in this country.
The object of the experiment, is really to test the ‘zone of personal space’ that exists, or doesn’t exist around you in various parts of the city. I have heard many strories about Grafton Street where women especially, had bought ‘that coat’ they had been waiting months for, only to arrive back at the car park, to find themselves holding nothing more than the handles, with the bag itself snipped off.
So there is a tip, if buying in Grafton Street – don’t end up carrying your week’s worth of grocceries and that coat that cost €400 at the same time – please make TWO trips and avoid, amateur artful dodgers, who have it too easy in a place like Grafton Street to relieve you of your personal belongings. Because the zone of personal space is so dramatically reduced – it is only later, after being robbed, you realise the implications of this phenomena.
But it is like that ad on TV, about women being able to think about several things at once…. sometimes it doesn’t always work to their advantage, and men are much more likely to make two or three trips back to the car booth, rather than lug around with a whole load of bags, advertising to be robbed.
There is a nice building just finished on a corner on Duke Street…. which is worth giving a look at … it is a valiant attempt at doing a corner building in that area of the city. The scafolding only just came off I think.
Anyhow, I would have had my cup of coffee looking at that, except I decided to have it in Grafton Street instead…. big mistake. It was the cherry on the cake that was my day, having scalding hot Bewley’s tea put all over you by uncaring passing pedestrians.
I mean, I was quite literally stuck to the wall, too, while all this was going on, and after the first spill, I decided I was already ‘so wet and scalded’ that I would conduct the experiment for 5 minutes. About 10 hits every five minutes I reckon on average.
It really didn’t seem to matter what breed, race, sex or age or people either…. the concept of a personal ‘bubble’ doesn’t exist in Grafton Street, and that is why most people don’t like it I think.
Sean O’Laoire brought up this point not too long ago, about the new different cultures of people here in Dublin now, having different definitions of what ‘a bubble of personal space’ actually is.
But, my observations shows, that in places like Grafton Street, that bubble is so reduced as to become of no use whatsoever…. all you can do actually is run out of the place.
One of the only advantages of keeping everything ‘inside’ a system like AutoCAD for architects, is having access to all that data from the one software.
Architects in practice are forever scared of the ‘guy who would use the different programme’ not being there on any given day, or leaving the practice altogether and being impossible to replace.
Meaning that all that data automatically becomes redundant too. This tends to the be the driving force behind use of software in general, and you see people ‘trying’ to do some pretty crazy stuff with AutoCAD… the kinds of operations you could just munch through using a more suitable application.
Sad, but true. 🙂
I was kinda hinting at this here:
At least you can discontinue using a forum email, stop using it altogether….
so problems like these:
Well to quote old G.K. Chesterson, who once said it is the simplest things in life which are indeed the most amazing. The best architecture always starts from this starting point…. but that isn’t as ‘easy’ as it sounds.
The natural instinct of the lay person would be just to ‘glance over’ these ordinary things…. whereas it is the duty of a good aspiring architect/student to rationalise, ordinary but nonetheless very amazing behaviours of most ordinary people.
I compare it to peoples’ discomfort experienced with a camera pointing towards them…. they don’t like it. Our celebs are proof of this. But that architect doesn’t have the luxury of putting his/her hand up against the camera and saying ‘go away’…. the architect is him/herself generally behind the camera.
An architect is duty bound to actually see how some very ordinary things which people have been doing since god only knows when. I used the old examples of archaeology, old transit systems being reused, old bridges and that sort of thing.
It is possible with a college course to completely avoid the sense that people will ‘use’ your architecture, what you draw, or design…. avoiding having to deal with the ‘ordinariness’ and amazment of everyday activities of people.
Doing ‘History of Architecture’ or some other ‘god awful’ subject in college, you may study an old Temple that is now stuck right in the middle of a jungle, or some ruined old village from a by-gone age…. we forget these places were once thriving centres of economies etc.
Hence why I think it is useful to look at some parallels in everyday life today, in that environment that people live and use.
No reason at all…. it is just that separating your online learning emails etc, etc…. isn’t a bad idea at all…. rather than having everything coming into one mail box.
A major part of my motivation for starting this thread:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2744
was to enable with me to deal a little bit, in some small way with this same problem. I.e. Just getting ‘comfortable’ with talking about these issues.
Very fair point.
I see where you are coming from now.
Correct, you would end up with something just so totally incomprehensible as to become a complete and absolute joke.
Everyone just conducting their very own private like talk…. that was necessary in aceshardware, because I could be troubleshooting some very obscure and tiny minute difficulty related to MS Windows OS or a new Graphics accelerator board or something…. so it would be really specfic and detailed.
I.e. If someone else ran into a similar problem at aceshardware…. they could pass on a possible diagnosis or fix etc.
Whereas the ‘restriction’ imposed by the sequential posting format does provide that necessary limit I guess to prevent a ‘real bird’s nest’ from happening.
BTW, I am a well known poster over at http://www.aceshardware.com/forum, though I don’t have the time these days to post anymore, and am largely ‘out’ of the IT end of things.
Back in the late nineties…. my suppliers of computers/components was a guy here in Dublin called ‘Gareth’….. when I would buy stuff from gareth I would quickly rush home and run questions by the ‘aceshardware’ message board… it was very surprising how useful and interesting a way this was to operate.
Hence I just kept ‘garethace’ hotmail and garethace handle ever since,…. even though I could be posting in completely different message boards.
Where did SW101 come from?
The important distinction I think to make is between building and landscape nowadays. A large portion of what architectural students work/study at in college nowadays is directly related to building – its structure and its fabric.
But in practice, out their in the real world, it is more like the whole package…. Libeskind, Nouvel, Tschumi, Ando, Moralles, and many, many more architects nowadays are cropping up in relation to books about just landscape design – either redefining/revisiting landscape design in cities or in the countryside, or suburbia. I.e. The way people intereact and feel most comfortable with various kinds of landscapes and places.
The young student of architecture, armed with a couple of lectures in waterproofing, structural beams and a class about the building regulations …. cannot even hope to even understand any modern architect from the right way. This is where the confusion occurs, where the young student goes down to the college Library, picks up a book about Koolhaas and starts thinking about Koolhaas armed with the limited knowledge gleaned from a class in building construction.
One of the best ways to look at a Tadao Ando book is to visit a few places like St. Stephens green, or the Botanical gardens on your Saturday with nice weather, and just look at how people use these environments….. then relate what you have actually experienced to the photos of the Ando building you see in the book. Be it a Museum in Japan, full of Japaness weekend-day-trippers, or whatever.
The problem arises when you spend you whole Saturday holed up inside armed with a Tadao Ando tomb and spend hours trying to interpret the text. But our Architectural colleges do not encourage people to ‘get out’ once in a while….. yet so much of ‘an understanding’ of architecture and space depends upon just that. I assume that is why more and more students nowadays have to resort to various kinds of bullshit.
I really do think that texts like Jellicoe are becoming really relevant all of a sudden again. Examples of ‘landscape’ scale architecture from the past such as the Irish su-terrains, the ha’penny bridge (Calatravas pumped something new back into bridge design and more have taken up that baton too), the Palladian Irish houses and their landscaped surrounds, canals, old rail lines becoming re-used as urban parks – these things are all becoming much more topical nowadays again.
For a while there, they just evaporated from the architectural scene….. but they are well back. In a way, Tschumi’s park de la Vilette in the 1980s fore-saw all of this….. I guess La Vilette was a response to dealing with growing peripheral suburbs, and car-driven infrastructure. Dunno.
Bear in mind, when Le Corbusier photo-ed his beautiful ‘object’ buildings with a Citroen in front of them….. traffic still had not yet ‘eroded’ public space to the same degree as it has now.
But for me, it is hard while studying a degree course in Architecture with lots and lots of ‘building-centric’ learning and study to do…… to perhaps make that ‘jump’ in terms of recognition of what the big contemporary practioners in architecture….. the Libeskinds of this world are doing today…… which is largely to make public open spaces, and sense of place an integral part of our environment again, after so many years of this being ignored by the profession.
In a way Stirling, Post-Modernism, Rossi, Bacon, Krier, Scarpa even and lots of other ‘1980s’ type people like Tschumi are responsible for putting issues of open public space etc back on the map, in architectural practice. I think ‘Charles Jencks’ even did a nice park recently up in Edinburgh.
Even in Dublin you can see examples of that shift back to ‘urban landscaping’ in projects like the Liffey Board walk and the Wolf Tone Park. Just passed Wolf Tone park today and it was being used for ‘low-rent’ inner city selling stand kind of commerce…. a huge difference from a public space at the heart of Dublin which wasn’t even used all through the 1980s/90s.
As I have said, this is a huge shift in terms of emphasis for the architectural profession, having largely ignored open public spaces for years and years – it is now re-discovering the existence of these issues once more.
It is just that architectural college is still too ‘building-centric’ and the practicioners like the Koolhaas, Libeskind etc, while having a very simple and straightforward job of going around the world and ‘re-instating’ public space in cities today….. are largely mis-understood and mis-interpreted by both the student population out there and the lecturing staff.
Lecturing staff themselves simply have not got the vocabulary or familiarity with ‘landscape’ sized issues about space and its use by people….. to constructively answer a larger portion of the ‘questions’ which students are trying to ask.
Or if the lecturing staff DO understand something about open public spatial design…. then they find it damned difficult to get across to a bunch of students…. believe me I have witnessed several attempts…. and the phrase ‘that flew over my head’ definitely springs to my mind.
A bit like parents and sex education with young kids maybe…. dunno. 🙂 It is hard for today’s crop of young students to be informed enough in order to practice ‘safe architecture’. 🙂 Years ago it was simpler, you just didn’t talk about those things. LOL! And didn’t ask too many questions about Po-Mo….
Brian O’ Hanlon.
It is basically up to every individual to take the web as seriously as they wish…. but http://www.aceshardware.com/forum is used by a lot of IT managers responsible for million Euro budgets and investment management each year…. so updating awareness and learning is part of their job description.
I find it interesting just how sucessful a format aceshardware message board was, for debating fairly complex IT issues, from all kinds of angles.
What I like about Aceshardware message board so much though, is the shere number of opinions it can accomodate on a single topic.
A sequential message board like this one, generally will only accomodate a couple of fairly familiar posters…. like the people who regularly post here at Archiseek.
While Aceshardware accomodates literally hundreds every week, all posting opinions and creating a virtual melting pot of ideas and thinking about IT.
that is basically what it does alright…. in the general sense, but the ERSI link also proves how many ‘architectural’ conclusions a GIS approach is capable of generating.
While CAD may be very geared toward representing the advanced language of 2D line weights, dimension lines, hatching, shading, …..
I don’t think a CAD software is going to generate any great conclusions on its own. But I do see architects trying to modify their CAD type software as ‘design generation tools’.
Looking at those ERSI projects, I am just wondering is a GIS still approach far more suit towards generating results, based on values or ‘rules’ you would input into the computer.
Some of the visual information coming from those GIS generated presentations was very interesting from an architectural point of view. This is interesting, as geographers are often times accused by architects of NOT being ‘visual’ kinds of people, or as much ‘spatially minded’ so much as verbal people.
If GIS still has to be exploited, I would say that CAD has pretty much past that point, and every new release these days, finds it very difficult to justify itself at all.
This AutoCAD Upgrade Makes Sense
Guest Editorial
by Darren J. YoungAfter reading comments regarding AutoCAD 2005, I come to the conclusion that most have lost their sense of objectivity. I’ve done my fair share of Autodesk bashing, but some of the reader’s comments seem out of place — considering the product isn’t on the dealers’ shelves, and there’s very few who have even seen it.
While it may seem like Autodesk thinks we have all the time in the world to learn new things, this doesn’t mean they should stop development, or be geared toward writing functions for which there are already a wealth of free AutoLISP routines to take care of. Would anyone in their right mind pay $300 for an update that allows you to glue a couple lines back together?
As far as Autodesk ignoring basic drafting needs with AutoCAD 2005, I think people are missing the significance of this release. You want to revise a detail number? Or add a sheet in the middle of a set, and have all references update automatically? It’s in there. From what I’ve gathered, sheet sets are not the easiest to set up, but AutoCAD’ll do it, and do it automatically once configured properly.
Built-in table objects? Seems like a basic drafting need to me.
I can’t think of any release since I started back on R10 that has the potential to significantly impact the productivity of such a wide range of users — if people would only take the time to learn of it.
It seems to me as if nobody is happy unless the product is easy and tailored to them — at the expense of everyone else. Until such time that Autodesk adds a mind-reading module, there’s no way AutoCAD will EVER offer the flexibility everyone demands, and make it so simple that it just happens the way you want it.
I, for one, welcome the shift Autodesk seems to be making: from minor, token, little, polished enhancements that touch the lives of a small handful of users, to a more big-picture approach that includes some real vision into the future. Autodesk shouldn’t focus on helping people do tasks better, like drawing lines and arcs; they should focus on helping users do their jobs better. AutoCAD 2005 is the first time in a long time, if not ever, that I’ve seen Autodesk move in what I think is the right direction.
If someone wants the polish, they should look into buying third- party add-ons, like Terry Dotson’s ToolPac <http://www.dotsoft.com> or Owen Wengerd’s QuikPik <http://www.manusoft.com>. Both add a lot of polish and day-to-day productivity enhancements for a lot less than the price of an AutoCAD upgrade. There’s a wealth of talented good third-party developers out there for specific needs.
For once, Autodesk has stopped listening to the naysayers who think AutoCAD is a mature product, and that there’s really nothing left for Autodesk to do with it. That lack of imagination is what’s left users reluctant to upgrade — not the absence of a routine that heals a couple broken lines.
If AutoCAD 2005 sales do poorly, it’ll be a result of people being complacent about accepting what’s handed to them, and not demanding real insight and imagination.
(Darren J. Young is a CAD/CAM systems developer in Minnesota, USA.)
