Voyansi Voices Blog

Santiago Calatrava, the architect in charge of designing the World Trade Center station’s entrance had an immense job requiring expertise and creativity. One bad decision could make everything go south. After a lot of thought, he came up with his final design for the project. He sought to design a structure that resembled a bird taking flight from a children’s hand. The end result: A unique and imposing structure that captures every pedestrian’s gaze: The Oculus.

You might have seen it in films, tv shows and many architecture-related websites and social media accounts. If you are lucky, you might have the opportunity to visit it in person just like we did during our BIM World Tour after grabbing a bite at the Chelsea Market.

Continuing on our post from last week about the reuse of space & the NY high line, we stopped for lunch at the world-famous Chelsea Market: an exciting place for both tourists and locals. Situated in Chelsea, a New York neighborhood in Manhattan with a rich cultural history dating back to the 1800s. The Chelsea Market offers various interesting cultural, culinary, and social activities for both tourists and locals. After a long walk on the High Line, it was time for lunch, and also to check out one of NYC’s most expensive real estate transactions in history.

Some people are still not aware of how BIM could make an enormous and positive difference in their professional careers, which means they are unaware of its capabilities and the role it’s going to play in the recent future.

Studying architecture is synonymous with using different software tools to design and plan. Students often render several versions of their projects so that they can see what they would actually look like once they’ve been built. However, despite all the innovations that this software has, many architects are letting go of traditional practices to focus their efforts on BIM.

Generally speaking, the buildings that impress people all around the world are architectural wonders that couldn’t be constructed without leveraging BIM. Why? There are many stakeholders involved in the complex design and build efforts of new structures. This presents many challenges for architects who are still often using tools that don’t bring to the table all of what BIM has to offer.

Reinventing spaces does not only require resources, but also tons of creativity: Where you see an old railroad, others visualize the possibility of a park, hotel, or even a culinary voyage. There are no limits when it comes to revitalization of spaces (both old and new), and the High Line park is the perfect example of this.

Making robust, rusty and old rails coexist with nature is, in and of itself, a huge task since there are many things that could go wrong: It might not be aesthetically pleasing, nor a good deal in economic terms if not correctly planned. But if the team working on that renovation is up to the task, the results can end up being game-changing in a completely urban context.

I'm going to keep this post short today. Over the last several months, I've been writing about taking ownership of your spaces. Starting with your internal standards and content, and culminating in the Holy Grail of unified dashboards. I wanted to take a minute to pull all of my thoughts together when it struck me:

It’s critically important to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes when having a conversation. A few years back when I was young in my career, I remember responding in a way I felt was extremely polite: “Yes Sir.” The dour look on my colleague’s face suggested I had made an error. Turns out, while this is pretty common where I’m from in Texas, it's less so in central England. The true implication of my statement was that he was old. A grave mistake coming from a 23-year-old recent college graduate just getting started in life. 

Today, we will talk about everything. Everything in the context of the Highgate Elementary School in California. We’ll start with some basic statistics. This Elementary School is made up of 6 buildings, a total of 58,335 square feet. Maybe that sounds small, maybe it sounds large. It’s all relative afterall. There is more to it than that. If I asked you to picture a school in your mind, it’s not just the buildings, it’s experiential. The laughter, recess, warm afternoons in the sun swinging carefree on a swingset with your friends. No cares in the world, other than how soon recess is ending.

Every week, new platforms emerge to help manage every aspect of the business. There never seems like the right time to hop into something new. However, this week we'll discuss the other side. Understanding where your current software ecosystem is hurting your business. These areas can be hard to detect, especially when you've been running the same systems for years. Technical debt builds up beneath the surface, and before you know it, more agile competitors are producing things at a pace that seems like magic.

We love doing our job but we get an extra reward when you help the community. The Center of Hope project consisted of making a series of renderings that allow the client to give life to the project and have precise material to show to future investors. These agents are a key part of the project, their resources are needed to make this project happen.

By leveraging the power of data-driven design, your team will not only come to optimal
spatial layouts today but improve your design process for the future at the same time.
Once finalized designs are manually adjusted, the feedback is sent to the repository for
future design generation.

We’ve spoken alot about how paper based workflows are a bottleneck to your process. McKinsey suggests that there is up to a 25% productivity gain to be had by decreasing the burden of information and data transfer. Anecdotally, I’d agree that a good chunk of my time (probably 20-30% of my day personally) is taken up simply searching for and sharing information. 

Why? It’s a fundamental question we all learn at a young age. The drive to understand why we do what we do is as human as eating or breathing. Why do we work? Putting deep philosophy aside, most of us work to pay our bills. At work, there are different levels of participation. We all have additional drivers, various day-to-day responsibilities, and differing needs for our software, tools, and interaction levels with other employees.