by Keiko Kusano

Freedom Architects Design, a Japan-based architectural design firm with 16 studios and more than 20 years of history, builds approximately 400 made-to-order homes each year. In February 2017, the firm began offering VR walkthroughs for clients as part of its process.

Until recently, virtual reality in architecture was available in Japan only through major general contractors and home builders. Now, Freedom Architects is rolling out its own VR Architects System, a new initiative for the made-to-order housing market. The system lets clients, wearing head-mounted displays, fully explore a potential home’s interior. Using virtual reality visualizations of homes during the design process, it’s possible to determine and implement changes before breaking ground.

In August 2016, Freedom Architects became the first firm in Japan to receive certification for a building plan through the submission of BIM data, which was created using Autodesk Revit. This first-ever BIM-based architectural certification was a cooperative effort by the Otsuka Corporation, Autodesk, and the Jutaku Seinou Hyouka Center (Housing Performance Evaluation Center) Corporation. Now, Freedom Architects’ new initiative to introduce VR takes its use of BIM to the next level.

“When we surveyed our customers, they overwhelmingly requested the ability to explore their homes using VR as they were being designed,” says Makoto Nagasawa, Freedom Architects’ director of development. The company realized if VR could be used to let clients realistically “walk around a home” during its initial design stages, those clients could more quickly understand the architect’s vision and make specific requests of their own.

Clients who tried Freedom Architects’ VR system responded favorably; with the system, experiencing the space made design plans very easy to understand. One client was able to walk from the kitchen to the laundry room and see how many steps it would take to get there. Another client was wondering where to store some favorite large plates, and was able to explore the kitchen to find an appropriate shelf. A couple with an eight-inch difference in height “stood” in their virtual kitchen; the husband observed, “Isn’t this range hood in the way?” and the wife replied, “I didn’t notice that at all from my height.” During these VR sessions with clients, a large monitor displays the client’s point of view, which allows Freedom Architects’ staff to observe and understand how clients see their designs. Through this visual reference, they can better understand their clients’ needs beyond their specific requests.

In Freedom Architects’ immersive-visualization process, design data created using Autodesk Revit is converted to Revit Live data through its cloud service. Then, the game engine and real-time rendering software Stingray is used to visualize that data more realistically. Freedom Architects uses HTC Vive head-mounted displays to provide VR environments that clients can then “walk” through.

Even environmental influences such as sunlight are precisely simulated in these VR environments. In one example, a client requested a design in which the morning sun would fill a bedroom. A long, wide window was added to meet this demand, but simulations showed that sunlight would not shine into the room until 10 a.m. By changing the wide window to a taller one, the design was adjusted so that sunlight would stream into the room at an earlier hour.

“Until now, architects would realize certain aspects of their designs only when they could see the completed building,” Nagasawa says. “There is always something you notice with your own eyes, something you wish you could change after the fact. Experience from numerous projects helps architects develop their sensibilities in this respect, but there remains a gap of about a year from the time plans are drawn until a building is completed. However, VR allows you to experience and explore your own designs in a matter of hours.

“It becomes easy to check spaces in person, and then go back to the drawing to make corrections,” Nagasawa continues. “This has changed the approach of our architects. It gives them more confidence when they explain their designs to clients. Their conviction in their designs comes from the fact that they are able to preview in great detail the spaces they are creating. VR is not just for clients; I think VR will also revolutionize the way architects approach their work.”

Furniture and appliances can also be input into the BIM data. This allows these objects to be viewed in a way that accurately re-creates their proportion and placement at a level of detail that includes shape, color, finish, and texture.

“Many furniture manufacturers around the world are providing 3D models, which we can download and import into our BIM data,” Nagasawa says. “If furniture can be decided on at an early stage, it can then be ordered even before the home’s design is finalized. When we order products made outside of Japan, sometimes we have to have them shipped by air to arrive in time, which can be expensive, or turn to stock already in Japan, which often is not in the desired color or configuration. Being able to decide on furniture at an early stage has had benefits beyond our initial expectations.”

A saying about home building goes, “Build three houses to get the one you want.” But what if you could use VR to examine every nook and cranny of a home before it was built? Nagasawa says that “a home designed in VR is the first iteration.” When both architects and their clients make use of VR, they can share a concrete image of the home they are building while exchanging ideas, making their interactions literally and figuratively a constructive process. This results in greater satisfaction in the finished home among all involved parties.

Using this technology, the client works alongside the architect in an ideal approach to home building. Once lighting and acoustics simulations become more widely available, the home-building industry will find even more applications for VR in their work.

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This article originally appeared on Autodesk’s Redshift, a site dedicated to inspiring designers, engineers, builders, and makers.

Keiko Kusano is a freelance editor/writer based in Tokyo, specializing in design and art.

The post Freedom Architects Advances Home Designs Using VR Showrooms appeared first on Archipreneur.

by Jeff Link

The intrigue and clarity of form found in these works, along with recent large-scale projects—the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston and the interior renovation of Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago—have propelled Johnston Marklee into the good graces of architecture’s elite. The Los Angeles–based firm, founded by Johnston and Lee in 1998, has earned more than 30 major awards, and its work has been exhibited in the permanent collections of many museums.

The duo was recently chosen as the artistic directors of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the largest architecture and design exhibition in North America, which runs from 16 September 2017 – 7 January 2018. In close collaboration with Mark Kelly, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, they’ve assembled an impressive roster of 141 artists and architects from 20 countries, whose installations respond to this year’s theme, “Make New History.”

Here, Johnston discusses the Biennial; her formative years in Marfa, Texas; recent museum projects; a new book; and history’s role in informing architecture.

Enjoy the interview!

Why did you choose the theme “Make New History” for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial?

Part of it came from the observation of things we saw with the first Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015. Looking at the themes we chose—material histories, image histories, building histories, and civic histories—we felt a kind of urgency about the ways in which all of us were thinking about how to advance our work through a sense of the historical continuum of architectural practice. One of the observations we’ve made is that images, information, and knowledge are so instantaneous now, there is a need for us to understand historical information as a set of active ideas and that we must find new ways to connect the contemporary with notions of the past.

Directing the Biennial seems like an immense creative and logistical challenge. Where do you begin?

We’re architects, not curators, and we came to it with that perspective. We talked to a lot of architects whose work we knew well and shared the theme and asked them to suggest projects. A few projects were special curated pieces that approached problems through a tighter lens. Vertical City [an exhibit in which 15 firms have designed contemporary 16-foot-tall models of their take on the historic 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower design contest], for example, creates an experience like you’re in a hypostyle hall. It doesn’t operate with the usual representative tools and scales. This is a public exhibition, and we wanted to create spatial experiences for people in environments they could inhabit; that’s what we do as architects.

How do you think your exposure to the art world in Marfa, Texas, has influenced your architecture?

The salient thing about Marfa, despite it being pretty rural, is that it has an urban legacy, in part because of the work of the Chinati Foundation and the Judd Foundation. We’ve built many friendships with artists, who we met while in Marfa, that we collaborate with today. These experiences helped us formulate an idea about the understanding of our discipline. The community at Marfa is very fluid. Artists are working alongside ranchers, writers, and locals. It’s very unpretentious. Everybody has something to say. People aren’t worried about boundaries. That left an impression, I think. We’re architects, we don’t want to be writers, but we appreciate dialogue outside our discipline about shared interests.

You’ve been involved in some other exciting recent projects, including the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston and the renovation of the MCA in Chicago. How do make these formal spaces more welcoming and accessible to the public?

Part of our approach comes from our experience in Marfa, and the importance of imbuing a feeling of generosity and a sense of invitation without boundaries between being outside, on the street, and being in an art space. Looking onto the new street inside the MCA, there is a certain strength of definition in the way the bays of the ceiling vault mark the space and clearly define it architecturally, but it’s also a generous space. The architecture does not overly determine how one can occupy the space. We’ve used architectural cues—proportions, materiality, and light—to connect you with the space.

The key piece to the transformation was inserting a staircase to the second floor at the end of the street to connect the two floors and extend this public space into the museum and enhance the journey through the building. In conversations with Sarah Whiting, the dean at the Rice University School of Architecture, both in our book and on many other occasions, she has introduced the condition of the middle. We like this term, which for us is not an average condition, but more of an active, oscillating space existing between an over- and under-defined architecture, which is the formulating principle behind the new public zones in the MCA.

The Menil is well regarded for having a democratic vision toward visitors and the engagement with art. It’s free, and the surrounding campus is open and porous to the neighborhood. In the Menil Drawing Institute, we’ve created a living room, and consolidated amenities and circulation and mixing spaces. The entry is not hierarchical; it’s not a grand foyer or lobby. It’s well-lit by natural light, comfortable, and meetings can be going on as you enter. Those are qualities we feel are important to create access and allow diverse voices to come together. Cultural projects challenge us to think about all the ways the building and the program and content can reflect the needs and interests visitors have.

You recently released a book, House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House, a play on Gertrude Stein’s poem “Sacred Emily.” Can you tell me about the premise of your book?

When we started our book, we knew it was going to be a big effort. We felt it was a little too early in our careers to do a traditional monograph. We hoped it could capture a certain collection of work and a series of ideas as a way to project forward and refine our thinking, rather than just encapsulating the projects from our early career.

We collaborated with artists whose portfolios we know well. They took photographs of our projects and captured aspects of the work that connected to their own vision as artists. We didn’t place any other parameters than which artist would look at what project. Reto Geiser, our collaborator, designed and edited the book as a collection of discrete conversations and portfolios. It was a chance for us to see the work through the artists’ eyes and react to these new perspectives and learn things about our own work as it is reflected back to us.

What advice would you give young architects hoping to make something new, as, say, Frank Gehry did with buildings, or Gertrude Stein did in a literary sense?

On some level, the Biennial addresses the question of new, the demand for newness as something that is valorized. Part of what we’re questioning is, “What does this question of ‘the new’ mean? Is novelty for its own sake interesting?”

We believe to be truly novel is incredibly difficult, and new ideas only come about after very intense periods of production and experimentation. What we see among practitioners is the recognition of the importance of the context in which they’re working. Not even one percent of buildings are iconic in the fabric of cities today. Understanding the fabric, the way we build cities and neighborhoods is an urgent matter for us. That’s what we wanted to focus on. The theme “Make New History” is something we believe may help us look inward, to debate the ideas that connect us versus those that divide us.

***

This article originally appeared on Autodesk’s Redshift, a site dedicated to inspiring designers, engineers, builders, and makers.

Jeff Link is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an Eddie-nominated journalist. His work has appeared in Landscape Architecture Magazine, gb&d, Redshift, and American Builders Quarterly.

The post Inside My Design Mind: Johnston Marklee’s Sharon Johnston on Making New History appeared first on Archipreneur.

by Zach Mortice

From this perspective, Redshift’s list of the most innovative architecture documents a different ethos. The concerns demonstrated here (housing inequality, the future of the global economy, the elastic nature of “innovation”) are not going away. They may even be amplified by the changing political tides that will have to wait a few years to see their expression in architecture. Rest assured, it’s coming.

1. Northerly Island by SmithGroupJJR/Studio Gang Architects (Chicago).

Technically completed in late 2015, this former airport-turned-wetland-peninsula took a while to grow into itself. But by summer 2016, Northerly Island had matured into an urban wildlife habitat like no other: a reparative landscape on Lake Michigan framing a great city’s skyline amid rolling hills, marshlands, prairie, and the call of ducks and herons. It’s a stunning example of adaptive reuse, using a landscape-architecture toolset to repair disused infrastructure.

2. T3 by Michael Green Architecture (Minneapolis).

Wood-structured high-rises fight climate change by sequestering carbon over the building’s lifetime, using wood beams that are lighter than steel but just as strong. Made of mass timber, Michael Green Architecture’s seven-story, 220,000-square-foot T3 office building became the largest contemporary wood-structured building in North America this year. The warm, wood-grained interior would’ve baffled the steel-and-glass modernists—the columns and room spanning-beams nod to tradition while resurrecting wood as a new standard-bearer for progressive design.

3. Starter Home by the Office of Jonathan Tate (New Orleans).

Home ownership, the middle class that has relied on it to build wealth, and the traditional starter home are all on the wane. So Jonathan Tate’s first step in lowering barriers to entry was astoundingly simple: “The first thing we do,” he says, “is eliminate the embedded cost in the land.” Tate custom-designs homes for the discarded, irregularly shaped lots that all cities have: disused parking lots, alleys, slivers of land next to waterways. These houses could be a single cross-section of a full McMansion, each uniquely suited to “leftovers” tossed aside by the real estate market.

4. Via 57 West by BIG (New York City).

Rising from a rectangular base, this multifaceted addition to Manhattan’s skyline, by one of the world’s wittiest and most experimental architecture firms, gets its unusual shape by lifting up one corner of the building to a 450-foot peak. The building hybridizes the typical high-rise profile with a European-style perimeter courtyard apartment block. With New York beset by champagne flute-thin apartment towers for a mostly anonymous globe-trotting elite, Via 57 West is a more public-minded project that works at the scale of the street.

5. Carmel Place by nArchitects (New York City).

Carmel Place is New York’s first micro-unit apartment building, a much-theorized building type that’s mostly illegal due to zoning restrictions. nArchitects’ project—made of 65 steel-framed modular pieces stacked like LEGOs, with a classic New York skyscraper setback profile—required zoning exceptions, both for the minimum unit size and maximum density of units. But its studio apartments, as small as 260 square feet, could model a pressure-release valve for New York and other cities where housing is scarce and space is at a premium.

6. Jeddah Tower by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia).

Even in an age of rapidly multiplying cloud-piercers, everything about the Jeddah Tower is superlative. Currently under construction, the 3,280-foot skyscraper will be the tallest in the world by more than 500 feet, and its observation deck on the 157th floor will be the highest in existence. It may reference desert-plant fronds, but what’s most fascinating about Jeddah Tower is how vulnerable the ultra-high-rise typology looks today. Its best patrons (Middle Eastern oil regimes and China) are beset by low oil prices and economies built on infrastructure that has expanded too quickly. In that light, this gilded crystalline refuge might be the final exclamation point at the end of architecture’s sky colonization.

7. Mercedes-Benz Stadium by HOK (Atlanta).

The design of sports stadia is a conservative game, more often concerned with conjuring up red-brick visions of yesteryear than blazing new paths. But HOK is building a $1.5 billion faceted glass and metal jewel for the Atlanta Falcons, forging new precedents for event architecture. Its signature feature is a retractable roof made of eight panels that open and shut like a camera lens. Its designers are forgoing a monolithic media wall and instead installing a 360-degree halo-shaped media screen that’s five stories tall and 1,100 feet long—triple the size of existing NFL stadium screens, according to Fast Company.

8. Cricket Shelter Farm by Terreform ONE (Brooklyn, NY).

Not many foodstuffs can beat crickets for their efficiency in converting energy into protein. And not many carbon-efficient food systems are as untouched by architectural investigation as insect farming. The Cricket Shelter Farm is a pavilion made from hundreds of plastic jugs connected via tubes. Its sculpted curves and composite cellular components advertise a brave new world of low-carbon protein production. The pavilion certainly has a strong aesthetic presence, but Terreform ONE’s Mitchell Joachim says most of his design concerns were purely functional. For Joachim, a baseline belief for all design is that “the form must embed desire,” which takes on unique meaning when you’re talking about a food source that has to overcome cultural taboos and some stomach-churning to get to the supermarket.

9. Botswana Innovation Hub by SHoP Architects (Gaborone, Botswana).

With its Botswana Innovation Hub, SHoP offers its vision of a developing-world collaborative research facility—one with a design that would be just as at home in Silicon Valley. The complex, created to support innovation and research, is arranged as a set of three long, rounded bars connected by walkways and landscaped courtyards. The mega-complex, now under construction, has the sleek profile of a starship—albeit one that can collect rainwater and solar energy, and will be covered in an “energy blanket” shaggy green roof.

10. Pennovation Center by HWKN (Philadelphia).

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennovation Center, you can code an app, build a robot, or sequence DNA. An all-purpose research and entrepreneurship hub, it’s accessible to both students and outside groups. Its labs and machine-fabrication workshops give second life to an old brick DuPont paint-research facility—a clever example of adaptive reuse. The north façade is made up of triangular steel and glass shards that frame a set of stadium-style stair seating for aspiring TED Talk-ers. “Many people talk about disruption, but most innovation comes out of evolution,” says HWKN’s Matthias Hollwich. “You take ideas and regenerate them with incredible new properties that lead into the future, and that’s what we did with the building.”

***

This article originally appeared on Autodesk’s Redshift, a site dedicated to inspiring designers, engineers, builders, and makers.

Zach Mortice is an architectural journalist based in Chicago.

The post Tall, Green, and Global: 10 of the Most Innovative Architecture Projects of 2016 appeared first on Archipreneur.

by Kim O’Connell

This scenario is becoming increasingly common as more architects incorporate virtual reality (VR) into their practices. Along with its cousins—augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR)—virtual reality allows designers to push the boundaries of visualization, giving colleagues and clients new ways to experience and understand a building or space long before it is actually built. With VR, architects can transmit not just what a building will look like, but also what it will feel like.

“Traditionally in architecture, you have blueprints and scale models, and 3D modeling has been around in force for the last 20 years,” says Jeff Mottle, president and CEO of CGarchitect Digital Media Corp. and publisher of CGarchitect, an online magazine and community for architectural-visualization professionals. “VR plays into these traditional methods because the two fit closely together, more than the manufacturers actually realize.”

Manufacturers still mostly view VR for gaming rather than enterprise solutions – but that is changing, according to Mottle, who just moderated a panel about these emerging technologies at this year’s Autodesk University Las Vegas.
With the dizzying rate of technology advancement and growing options, here are four considerations for firms thinking of entering this brave new virtual world.

1. VR is a rapidly changing industry.

Virtual reality has been around in some form for decades (with the first head-mounted systems debuting in 1968), but the technology has not been elastic or advanced enough to have widespread application until now. With advances in mobile technology, which placed high-resolution imagery into everyone’s hands, VR has experienced an explosion in the past two years.

Widely available head-mounted displays (HMDs) such as Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens, and Google Cardboard have brought VR into the mainstream and made it more affordable (although costs generally still run from hundreds to thousands). Facebook’s purchase of Oculus for $2 billion in 2014 also offered the industry a highly visible boost.

“One of the challenges is everything is changing so quickly,” Mottle says. “Not everyone has the time or resources to try every one of these HMDs, so we’re trying to get the dialogue going to discuss the pros and cons.”

According to a survey in CGarchitect, the leading users of VR for architectural visualization are in Europe (40 percent) and the United States (21 percent), with commenters saying that the technology will be revolutionary for the industry. Nearly 70 percent of respondents are using VR/AR/MR in production or planning to do so in 2017, while 77 percent were experimenting with the technology or planning to do so.

2. VR, AR, and MR are similar but have different capabilities.

VR is the immersive, full-headset experience that most people associate with this technology. “With virtual reality, you’re immersing yourself into a virtual environment and closing yourself off completely from the outside world,” Mottle says. “Depending on which device you’re using, you could do room-scale VR and ‘walk’ through the space.” (And with grid guidelines in your virtual world, you won’t accidentally walk into a real wall.)

With augmented reality, data and/or instructional information are animated over the real-world view, often through smaller devices such as a mobile phone or tablet. Pokémon Go is a popular consumer example of an augmented-reality app; a professional use case would be an engineer remotely teaching a mechanic how to repair something.

Then there’s MR: Mixing together aspects of VR and AR, MR takes virtual objects and overlays them onto the real world. Two people (say, an architect and a structural engineer based in another country) can be networked into a virtual world where they can interact together with a virtual building on a real site.

3. Architects can use VR at various stages in the design process.

One benefit of VR is that it can be rendered at different Levels of Detail (LOD), so an architect in the early design phase could have an immersive experience in a non-photorealistic room, just to get a sense of spatial relationships and massing. Or the experience could be hyperreal, so that a VR video could have soft sunlight filtering down through a clerestory window, with the sound of birds chirping outside (for client presentations).

Increasingly, architects are integrating VR hardware such as HTC Vive and Oculus with BIM software. “This will allow architects and clients alike to truly understand the spatial qualities of the project,” says Kim Baumann Larsen, an architect and the VR advisor for The Future Group. “This spatial understanding should make clients more confident in the design and reduce time spent in meetings and the use of lateral design revisions.”

Mobile VR solutions using cardboard headsets and a smartphone are another increasingly popular solution. “The architect can render stereo 360 panoramic images directly from the BIM software such as [Autodesk] Revit or using a visualization tool like 3ds Max with V-Ray, and publish the images to the web using third-party services like VRto.me or IrisVR Scope,” Larsen says.

4. VR has some catching up to do with the architecture industry.

VR requires a fair amount of expertise, and it’s challenging for architects to find work time to experiment with the technology. “For the most part, VR relies on gaming engines to develop these immersive experiences,” Mottle says. “That has a whole different workflow and paradigm than architecture.”

He hopes that manufacturers will see the potential for developing VR solutions specifically geared toward architecture. Already, some firms are translating BIM data into VR with platforms such as Autodesk LIVE and Stingray, which maintains important building data that other gaming systems don’t capture. For now, though, gaming systems tend to focus on creating idealized end-user VR experiences rather than applications for iterative building-project design and construction.

The more architects get involved with VR, the more they can shape the future marketplace. “I’d really like to see these VR companies realize that there’s a market beyond gaming and the consumer market,” Mottle says. “I would like them to see that there are some huge opportunities and synergies with the design world.”

But Larsen says architects shouldn’t wait to dig in: “Get a PC-based VR system like the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift for exploring design from BIM tools, and play with mobile VR using cardboard and Gear VR and Google’s View to distribute your designs in VR to clients and collaborators alike. The most important thing is to start experimenting.”

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This article originally appeared on Autodesk’s Redshift, a site dedicated to inspiring designers, engineers, builders, and makers.

Kim O’Connell is a Washington, D.C. area writer specializing in history, nature, architecture, and life. In addition to writing for a range of national and regional publications, she is a former writer in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Shenandoah National Park. She can be reached via her website, kimaoconnell.com.

The post 4 Tips to Get Started with Virtual Reality in Architecture appeared first on Archipreneur.