IES Blog

Well, we made it to Chicago. We weren’t going to let a little “winter storm warning” stop us from the biggest HVAC show of the year!

The energy has been great at the show so far – lots of excitement for the industry. Prior to the floor opening, there was big news from ASHRAE. The go-to source for standards and education for this industry, ASHRAE got a facelift, complete with a new logo and a new tagline…

Shaping Tomorrow’s Built Environment Today

Given our focus at IES this year, we are thrilled to see ASHRAE’s commitment to pushing the built environment in the 21st century. As ASHRAE President Ron Jarnagin stated, “integrated design is the cornerstone of sustainable buildings.” As the ‘Hub’ for sustainable design advancements, we look forward to joining ASHRAE in the conversation, promoting the importance of utilizing quantifiable performance information to design truly sustainable buildings.

We’ve also been following the conversation on Twitter. Kimberly Schwartz, managing editor of The ACHR News, tweeted a great picture (http://pic.twitter.com/6u2IsRSd) from the show floor yesterday afternoon, adding “…the aisles are still crowded! There’s a good buzz in the air.”

But the highlight of our day yesterday? Well, we’ll just let the image speak for itself…

See you on the show floor!

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Tags:AHR, ASHRAE, Building, chicago, design, energy, Environment, event, HVAC, IES, Sustainability, Twitter

I think Frank Sinatra would be excited to see the boom in architecture in the Windy City. Well, if Mr. Sinatra was interested in architecture. Which I imagine he was ;).

There certainly seems to be an architectural revival of sorts in Chicago these days. It seems more often than not, my Google alerts about “architecture” contain some sort of article relating in some way, shape or form to Chicago.

The article I read this morning was a recap of the recent BIMForum event in Chicago. The BIMForum’s mission is to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption of building information modeling (BIM) in the AEC industry [and] lead by example and synchronize with counterparts in all sectors of the industry to jointly develop best practice for virtual design and construction (VDC).”

Federico Negro recently attended the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) event. He was there to present his work, but he walked away with further knowledge on the adoption of BIM and how it is understood.

I’ve spent a good deal of time on the BIMForum website this morning, and there is some great content that I think all architects should spend some time reading. The focus of last month’s event - how BIM is used to find the optimal balance of allowing the best decisions to be made at the most appropriate time without impacting construction costs and schedules and how this is shifting when design ends and construction begins – is certainly a topic of conversation that is here to stay.

It begs the question – in today’s integrated BIM projects, where does design end and construction begin?

What do you think? How do you integrate BIM into your projects? This topic fascinates me, and I hope you’ll share your thoughts below.

PS – I thought I’d close this blog post with a mini plug for our upcoming Training Road Show series. The first one is in Chicago, so you see, there’s a tie-in!

The IES Training Road Show is a series of two-day training programs taking place across North America, offering attendees the opportunity to learn simulation techniques and methods to enable more sustainable design practices. First up on the road show we will touching down in Chicago on August 17th & 18th, followed by Denver on the 22nd & 23rd. A lot more cities to be announced very soon!

Full details here: http://www.iesve.com/training/events

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Tags:Architects, BIM, chicago, event, IES, Sustainability, Training