Hello everyone,
Last Tuesday 9th of May we had our last Algorithmic Design – BIM workshop in Hong Kong organised by Graphisoft. In this workshop, we did a quick alive exercise to show the connection in between Rhino – Grasshopper and ARCHICAD 20. As you already know Grasshopper from Rhinoceros is the world leading Algorithmic Design Tool for architects. The connection in between it and ARCHICAD joins the best of both workflows, algorithmic design and BIM.
As we already mentioned architecture firms in Hong Kong are slowly starting to understand the benefits of use BIM in their projects, but the implementation still has a long way to go… Nevertheless, we have met a good amount of professionals that use algorithmic design in their daily basis and have a lot of interest in the connection with BIM workflow using ARCHICAD.
So we thought that a good exercise for our workshop could be to start with a typical Hong Kong residential tower floor plate to play with. The purpose of the exercise is to see the immediate results in ARCHICAD when applying modifications to tower using Grasshopper Scripts. Having a native model in ARCHICAD has a lot of advantages as we know. But of course is important to know how the translation in between Softwares happens.
All native elements in ARCHICAD need a particular translation from Grasshopper. Jorge Benéitez did a simple demonstration bringing slabs and walls to the ARCHICAD model. Then using Grasshopper scripts to alternate these elements the documentation generated in the ARCHICAD model would update automatically.
This process which may look simple is what is attracting algorithmic design users into the use of BIM. Algorithmic design is a powerful tool for the design process in different aspects. But the step of producing documentation is a huge set back in this process. Users used to spend time exporting 2D files from 3D models in Rhino and start to redraw them again… This has been always an arduous and long task that breaks the flexibility of the process. ARCHICAD acts as a catalyst in this process to ensure that accurate documentation is extracted from the model automatically.
Focus more energy and time into design and improvement of the project rather than use that precious time redrawing our documentation…
In few steps, this combined workflow enlighten the advantages of the connection from the Algorithmic design user point of view. You want to have the freedom that working with algorithms give to the design process of the project. But now you can check alive the automated documentation that you no longer need to produce yourself. The idea is to focus more energy and time into design and improvement of the project rather than use that precious time redrawing our documentation…
Hope you enjoyed this article and please stay tuned for more free events to come.
