Bye-bye blueprint: 3D modeling catches on!

[News Writer]

You don't have to contemplate the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles for long to grasp the notion that standard two-dimensional drawings might be inadequate for architect Frank Gehry.

The buildings are fantastic explosions of curvilinear shapes, executed in ways that seem more appropriate for paper than structural steel. They're also representative of a dramatic new approach to designing and constructing buildings: building information modeling, or BIM, in which blueprints and other two-dimensional documents are replaced by 3D computer models, with each element of the design imbued with information about its real-world properties, such as how much weight a steel beam can hold.

Gehry became one of architecture's earliest practitioners of BIM techniques largely out of necessity, because his designs have increasingly relied on specialized fabrication and placement of materials.

"Bilbao was sort of the big landmark that showed the world things were possible (with BIM) that couldn't be done in any other process," said Dennis Shelden, chief technology officer of Gehry Technologies, a software and services firm commercializing some of the techniques and tools developed for Gehry projects.

Source: http://news.com.com/Bye-bye+blueprin...?tag=nefd.lede