0:17 Okay, so hello. We’re glad to be here today. This is the work that we’ve done at AiA Life Designers to help architects with early stage design. Environmental intelligence before digging into our presentation, we’d like to thank one for bringing together all of these experts and for your bringing inviting us here to be today in sunny Barcelona. I’m Carol Coca and I’ve been a BIM manager at AiA Life Designers for the past 5 years.

0:49 I specialize in improving productivity at a global level. My main goal is to develop tools that that help architects and engineers work more efficiently and make the day the day-to-day work easier. I’m very happy to be here today presenting with Michele Pescatori’s work. Hello everyone. I’m Michele Pescatori. I’m an architect, a trained architect, but at some point in my career I fell down the rabbit hole of competition design, BIM, and data and actually became a maker.

1:21 Today at AiA Life Designers I work across these topics around different scales from informal strategic development to project-specific needs. And we began in 2015. So now that you know who we are, I’m going to tell you what AiA Life Designers stands for and it’s not AI. AiA Life Designers means Architect and Engineer Associates. So in English, of course, architects and engineers working under one roof. And this model has been part of our practice since 1965.

1:55 Today AiA Life Designers brings together architects, engineers within all of the domains, project management, urban planning, and environmental expertise. And this all in France and international. Our key sectors are health care, education, urban living and working environment, industry, and mobility. One flagship project I I is currently working on is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It’s a major renovation project that combines complex existing conditions and new design.

2:36 Another major project is the Princess Grace Hospital Center in Monaco. It’s a very complex project in a very constrained site that combines architectural ambition and technical complexity. And one thing these projects have in common is science strong environmental ambition. But integrating environmental expertise into the early design process is not always easy. And that’s exactly what led us to start the Arch and Friends. In 2023, we brought together our global experts to rethink the way we design our projects and how environmental input could be integrated into the early design stage.

3:24 This group includes architects, computational designers, and BIM managers as myself, who could help architects to develop tools since they don’t know how to code. And environmental and facade engineers who help us understand the key inputs behind their analysis. Our main goal was simple, to improve the way we design and enhance the environmental performance in the early design But to do this we have we have many challenges.

3:58 Two major challenges. The first one is one that we have listened all over the presentation is that architects and environmental engineers don’t work in the same time zones. So we have disciplines that are working in silos. And problem is that architects rely on environmental analysis to develop to to integrate the the environmental impact. So our process was quite linear. Architects develop their projects. At some point the engineers did an analysis on a version of the project.

4:34 They delivered the results to the architect and the architect had to update the design. Problem is, as you know, the design process is nothing but linear. Architects like to test many many options. And by the time the results were delivered, they were often outdated. And the recommendations could not fully be implemented. Another challenge is that architects wanted to be able to collaborate more efficiently with engineers. They wanted to be able to test realistic solutions and design adapted by themselves.

5:11 And then interact with with the engineers. So With these with these challenges, we wanted to develop our tools. But in developing these tools, we have to address the priorities of each discipline. So for architects, the priority was to have real-time results. They wanted to be able to test every multiple option instantly and compare the options. And adjust make geometry and materials on the fly with these tools.

5:49 And they also, every architect, they wanted to balance efficiency with creative freedom. So, they wanted to have this sort of standardized and custom solutions. Environmental engineers, on the other hand, they needed consistent analysis. They had They had a framework that they they need to respect. And and we were we we hadn’t been able to customize environmental data as material coefficients, analysis period, and any every other parameter that influenced the project’s footprint.

6:29 Finally, we had structural engineers, who also needed flexibility as the architect. They wanted to be able to be able to choose between standardized and custom solutions, as long as they remained realistic and buildable. They also needed to analyze the building envelope globally, or focus on components as the glazed surfaces, for example. And the climate shading system, they wanted to be able to integrate with the performance protocols.

7:02 So, once we we knew all of these expectations, we were able to develop four cross-disciplinary tools that streamline collaboration, accelerate the decision-making, and improve analysis quality through the design process. So, now our timeline, engineers and architects work together, and they can test and iterate their and refine the project’s environmental performance on the same timeline. We no longer have disciplines working in silos. This tool is integrated directly into the architects environment Autodesk Revit.

7:44 So, they don’t have to go to any other tool. And the first tool we develop is envelope core. The first one is developed with Revit and Dynamo. It verifies whether the building envelope meets regulatory thermal performance requirements. Carbon score that analyzes the carbon impact of our projects. Permeability score that analyzes the permeability of the sites. And finally solar analysis that was developed with Rhino Inside, Grasshopper, and the Honeybee and Ladybug engines.

8:21 And it helps us to evaluate the solar irradiation and daily daylight factor in interior space. And this is the tool that we will develop for our demo. And now I leave Mikael, the expert behind the scenes of these tools, to explain. Thanks for the introduction. Now that you know the context on the why, we’re going to focus on the how. And just a few words on our approach.

Approach. So, we to build something meaningful, we try to have we built our approach in two steps: listen, translate, and empower. Listen is actually to get feedback about the actual process, understand where the friction occurs, because this is what the situation I work from. So, it’s difficult for each actor to interact with each other. Then translate by focusing on the needs of each discipline, because each discipline has particular needs on the management side and on the architectural side.

9:19 And then combining them to make the inputs for our tools. And then empower by focusing on the end user and build something useful and usable without expert knowledge, but still with expert standards. So, we started from the problem and thanks to the actual engineer who broke down to the fundamental components of the task that were not adding value to the design process and working on fiction like exporting files, remodeling geometry from a case suitable for environmental engineering software, and building manually analysis report.

9:53 So, all of that combined with the fact that you don’t have a live feedback with your actual job model made it clear we need a new approach. So, we laid out the features that Archon needs to have. So, we need to have a tool that was still embedded in the game environment and having a real-time connection with the architectural model because it’s truly being developed for architects.

10:19 A tool that handle automatic geometry synchronization to make suitable RV models for the energy simulation and this and a tool that enable architects to do fast iteration about architectural solution and just on selected object and not on full project scale. So, now that we have all of the requirements, we can start digging through the fundamental tools. And because our firm is heavily Revit-based, we start from our starting point was code list rather.

10:52 And it became pretty clear that to Rhino was the way to go for implementing a bridge between our models RV models and the Grasshopper ecosystem that has been built over the years to communicate with the Ember Plus. And and actually the communication has been built through Rhino Inside. Then we can talk about the new UI about the interfacing that we just created to make usable for non-expert people.

11:20 And all of that is then shipped and deployed through Pi Rhino to make the tool docked on the Rhino toolbar. So, just a small part of your office workplace where we just focus few words on of this Revit. So, for those who you might not know what this Revit is, a parametric database driven modeling environment where every element is an interconnected object enabling coordinated geometry, metadata, and documentation with a single model.

11:49 So, the interesting part is the database driven and interconnected object. Why? Because of the objects can store information and vice versa, information can be related to geometry. So, when we deep dive into what is actually beam object, for example, here windows, we can say that one key features is the context awareness. So, an element can tell us whether the inside is from the outside and this is a key point for environmental simulation because you need to know where the actual exposed surface is.

12:23 Beam data, of course, at different scales. You can manipulate and play with it. Of course, at the object scale, when you’re talking about a building component, and also at the at the project scale where you want to evaluate the consistency and the coherence of your design models. And then, we can deep dive into the object side and really start querying and interacting with the sub elements that compose our object.

12:50 And for our analysis, the glazing part would be a the things that we need. And also, you need materials to better understand which things our model is composed of. So, how did we integrate environmental variables inside this beam environment? Well, through the help of Rhino and inside Grasshopper and Ladybug tools, we’ve been able to query the model, extracting geometry, simplifying, and make it suitable for environmental analysis automatically.

13:22 Then, through We have all tools, we’ve been able to automatically do geometry creation, the geometry energy creation energy model creation by applying to the simplified geometry for the environmental for understood our engineers needed. And also because all the new sets are parametric, we can now interact dynamically with the students and play and fine-tune our parameters better suit our project works. Now that architects have a all the parameters that they need, they can produce meaningful results that speaks to each disciplines that meets actual standards, but they can also be made used into the beam models because the bridge we built create right inside works both ways, we can now push their data and the geometry into Revit.

14:14 And and have the data at the right time. So then architects can then use it for for example to produce 2D deliverables because at the end of the day architects are still paying to do to the models. That was the core of our tool but how we choose to interact with Well, when you’re talking about computational workflows, you’re often dealing with something that’s aggressively square, that it’s not user-friendly, that needs expert knowledge to be operated, and it’s hard to communicate.

14:46 So, you can kind of think it like Rhino is the bridge between your beam software and your environmental simulation, and Grasshopper is your car. You need to know how to drive the car to cross the bridge. So, we choose to build a user interface to be able to operate this tool. And now your car has become a bus where you just need to hop in and know where to stop.

15:12 And all the building complexity is built inside the interface. So, now the user can just interact with the tool by using buttons, check box, sliders, and plain text. So, we are reducing the activation energy needed to run this type of analysis. And well, the interface now becomes a place where all the needs and all the final results and translates are dots. And we can find environmental parameters for the engineers, and actors can play with fast parametric generation of solar shading, and then visualize the results inside the interface in 2D or 3D, and then ultimately push back the data inside it.

15:56 It can be the parametric shading under a geometry element, or just the data from the from the analysis into the BIM parameters. So, our journey wasn’t linear, but we learned a few things along the way. Actually, you need first to automate the boring stuff, because that’s where the value of your tool is. And always, when you’re building a tool, you need to educate people and educate the users.

16:29 They They need to be in charge, because the tool can be the heaviest in 90% of the of the of the problem, but you need still to do the 10% that’s left to make something meaningful with the actual results. And then, as we saw from presentation of yesterday’s presentation, when you’re dealing with a lot of multi-disciplinary workflows, well, it’s all about communication. So, you to better promote the adoption of the tool during the route to focus on your first step, this was like to listen to the people and listen to what they need to then make them and empower them to create some of these kind of products.

17:08 So, that’s for this. If you want to know more, feel free to reach out. We’re here to answer your questions. Thank you. Thank To learn more about the CDFAM Computational Design Symposium, access the archive of previous presentations, interviews with speakers, and information about future events around the world, visit CDFAM.com.