Autodesk’s annual recognition of its AEC customers’ projects has now been extended to include all disciplines in which Autodesk software is used—and there are many! Autodesk continues to combine the customer awards with its annual user conference at Autodesk University (with the last one occurring in New Orleans in November 2022). The awards are over and done with in a single late-evening session.
Accelerating Transformation in AEC
The AEC award went to Windover Construction for its remodel of the Cabot Street YMCA in the city of Beverly, Mass., which is part of an area known as Boston’s North Shore.
The 120-year-old building underwent a 44,000-square-foot renovation, which transformed the 45 single-room YMCA into 67 studio units and gave it a new name: Cabot Housing. It was part of the city’s affordable housing initiative. The pool and fitness center in the YMCA were removed and a fourth floor was added to accommodate the extra living space, offices, community center and bike storage.
The Windover project used laser scanners and drones to gather data for a model visualized in Navisworks. Steel and concrete and renovations to the existing building were modeled with Revit.
AEC Innovator of the Year
The AEC award for innovation went, ironically enough, to a 163-year-old John Sisk and Son company based in Dublin, for being able to deliver a cloud-based digital data center project in Sweden.
The project used BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud.
AEC Best Construction Project
The construction of the pyramids of Egypt in the ancient world may finally have been matched in the modern world with the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). This time, the Egyptians used technology, not slaves.
Just a few cubits from the Giza Pyramids, the 32,000 m² GEM is expected to house 100,000 artifacts, including relics from King Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Belgium-based BESIX teamed up with Cairo-based Orascom Construction to pioneer the use of building information modeling (BIM) in Egypt for a major public project.
The project used Autodesk Construction Cloud, which helped with coordinating more than 150 subcontractors.
The opening of the billion-dollar GEM is expected this year. After a few delays, we think they are sure this time.
AEC Best Building Design
The AEC Best Building Design award went to Shui On Joint Venture for its design of the Multi-welfare Services Complex in Hong Kong. The 8-story, 40,000 m² residential care facility for 1,750 of the city’s “elderly, disabled persons and mentally handicapped persons” (their words) in Kwu Tung (on the outskirts of Hong Kong close to Shenzhen, China) makes the Cabot Street project for 67 “low-income” (their words) residents look like small potatoes.
If you are doing the math, that’s 246 ft2, about 37 percent of the space that each resident of the Cabot Housing project in Boston’s North Bay (above) enjoys—that is, if you include the whole building and omit the first three floors of the Hong Kong facility, which will be used as a day care.
Elder care facilities are less common in China than in the U.S. China has a strong tradition of families taking care of their elders in multigenerational homes. Still, the interior designers of the Hong Kong facility sought to make the decorations as joyous as possible, using seven fruit colors and green and brown, symbolizing the leaves and branches of the Tree of Wisdom.
Shui On used the common data environment in Autodesk Construction Cloud to allow intra-disciplinary collaboration across design and building teams. The 1,700 residential units were modular, manufactured off-site and assembled on-site.
Sui On was able to create a virtual world that enabled workers to visualize the assembly of the modular units. Robotic scanners and drones were used to capture the assembly’s progress.
To be continued....