Autodesk® Toxik™ software is a node-based digital compositing solution with advanced image processing capabilities. The software’s architecture is built around its ultra-high resolution interaction and high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) core, which allows you to work interactively and intuitively with virtually any visual media, regardless of bit depth or image size. With its intuitive toolsets, open architecture, and high level of interoperability with Autodesk® Maya® software, Toxik is an ideal compositor for independent 2D visual effects artists as well as large-scale film and broadcast facilities.

ArchiCAD gives users the ability to create great architecture and increase productivity. From day one, ArchiCAD has been designed by architects for architects, and over the years it has gradually become more and more refined to allow its users to better:

Focus on design,
Manage change,
Evaluate design alternatives,
Collaborate,
Coordinate.

ArchiCAD® offers a different approach to your workflow process, which gives you more control over your design, while maintaining accuracy and efficiency in documentation. While you raise walls, lay floors, add doors and windows, build stairs and construct roofs this Building Information Authoring Tool creates a central database of 3D model data. From this you can extract all the information needed to completely describe your design - complete plans, sections and elevations, architectural and construction details, Bills of Quantities window/door/finish schedules, renderings, animations and virtual reality scenes. That means while you're designing, ArchiCAD is creating all the project documentation so there's little repetitive and tedious drafting work. And unlike designing in 2D software, the Virtual BuildingTM approach also means that you can make changes at any time maintaining the integrity of your documents, without risking costly errors or costing you productivity.

MicroStation is Bentley's flagship product for the design, construction and operation of the world's infrastructure. MicroStation and ProjectWise, Bentley's server line for AEC collaboration, form a robust foundation for Bentley's comprehensive portfolio of software solutions.

This 3D, solids modeling software provides a robust set of capabilities for object management, geometric modeling, drafting, information and standards management, visualization, drawing and report extraction, integration with analytical tools, and interference review.

TriForma improves communication and coordination by laying the foundation for a suite of discipline-specific applications that address the needs of the many fields involved in a building or plant engineering project; resulting in faster, better, more cost-effective projects. These solutions include:

* Bentley Architecture
* Bentley Structural
* Bentley HVAC
* PlantSpace Raceways
* PlantSpace Support Modeler
* PlantSpace Orthographics

Roof Designer for 3dsmax 9-2008-2009 | 4.38 Mb

Roof Designer is a new plug-in, currently only for Autodesk 3D Studio Max which helps architecture visualizers to model roofs. Roof Designer lets the user constrain mesh faces to geometrical planes, making all of the face's vertices reside on one flat surface. Roof Designer automatically texture the output and can even put mesh tiles, of the user's choice, on it.

Simplistically, postmodern architecture emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to the Modern Movement that had commanded world architecture since the mid-1920s. Its theories were first expounded by the American architect Robert Venturi and realized in his Chestnut Hill Villa of 1962. Within less than a decade, designers were willfully denying the pervasive geometrical glass boxes that Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson had dubbed the International Style. Ornament (which the modernists had once equated with crime), color, and texture were again accepted, rather embraced, by architects. Historical precedents were revisited and often transposed into the language of twentieth-century technology to become a new visual language, an architectural patois. Eclecticism, for years a pejorative term, became a basis for design. And at first it was just design, because architects made more drawings and models than buildings. Although it is difficult to choose from a plethora of examples, among the icons of this new way of making architecture were Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York (1978–1984) and Michael Graves’s “flamboyantly decorative” Portland Public Service Building in Oregon (1930–1983). As one commentator has observed, postmodernism became “the style of choice for developers of commercial buildings” everywhere. It has the same kind of stylistic anonymity of “globalness” as the Modernism it replaced.

Johnson (b. 1906) received a degree in architectural history from Harvard in 1930 and immediately became and first director of the Department of Design at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 1940, inspired by the work of the Dutch modernist J. J. P. Oud, he returned to Harvard and emerged with an architectural qualification four years later. He worked alone and with others and became widely known from the early 1950s for his puritanically modernist buildings—some consider him a clone of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—such as the Seagram Building in New York (with Mies, 1958) and the Glass House (1962) in New Canaan, Connecticut, until he formed a partnership with Burgee in 1967. Johnson then renounced Modernism (he had castigated Oud for doing that in 1946) and converted to postmodernism. His final artistic position was as an anti-postmodernist, leading the English architectural historian Dennis Sharp to opine that Johnson was philosophically fickle, with “more interest in [architectural] style than in substance.”
Be that as it may, the AT&T Corporate Headquarters at 550 Madison Avenue, New York City, is a milestone in the development of twentieth-century architecture, the first postmodern skyscraper and a key building in the popularization of postmodernism. The 600-foot-high (184-meter), bland rectangular prism covers its site. Perhaps in reference to nineteenth-century skyscrapers, perhaps to a classical column, the main facade is divided into three parts: an entrance at the base, a tall shaft of identical floors, and a wide band of windows near the building’s crown. The base, which originally enclosed public open space, includes portals of epic proportion. A central 110-foot-high (33-meter) arch, surmounted by oculi is flanked by three 60-foot-high (18-meter) rectangular doorways. Some critics suggest it borrows from Alberti’s Sant’ Andrea in Mantua, of 1472–1494. Unlike the featureless window-walls of modernist office towers, the shaft, is sheathed in pink granite, and the fenestration is designed (like the early skyscrapers) to express the steel structural frame beneath.

The most controversial feature of the AT&T Building was the 30-foot pediment, ostensibly to mask mechanical equipment on the roof. Many regarded it as kitsch, and critics immediately dubbed it “Chippendale” because it evoked the work of the eighteenth-century English cabinetmaker. Indeed, the epithet was applied to the entire building, and Johnson interpreted the bestowal of a nickname as complimentary; otherwise he described his building as a “neo-Renaissance essay on the use of stone.” In January 1992 the building was leased to the Sony Corporation.

Graves (b. 1934), one of the most honored twentieth-century architects, trained at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard. His early practice was limited to mostly domestic buildings. Among the notable examples are the Hanselmann house at Fort Wayne, Indiana (1967); additions to the Alexander house at Princeton, New Jersey (1971–1973); and the Crooks house, also at Fort Wayne (1976).

The Portland Public Service Building was the first of his large-scale projects to be realized. With subsequent commissions including the Humana Building at North Carolina State University (1982–1985), the San Juan Capistrano Public Library (1981–1983), and extensions to the Newark Museum (completed 1989), it placed him beside Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Frank Gehry, and Charles Gwathmey in the hall of champions of American postmodern architecture and design.

The freestanding fifteen-story municipal office building on Southwest Fifth Avenue, Portland, Oregon, houses the municipal Building, Planning and Design Review departments. It was the winning entry in a design-and-build competition sponsored by the city fathers. Johnson, as adviser to the jury and the client, was influential in securing the commission for Graves over the other shortlisted designs by Arthur Erickson and the Mitchell-Giurgola partnership.

Built on an entire 200-foot-square (61-meter-square) city block in the urban precinct, it is flanked by the city hall and county courthouse buildings on two sides, and a transit mall and a park on the others. To emphasize the association with other local government functions, Graves deliberately organized the facades in what he described as a “classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head,” an approach that Johnson adopted for the AT&T Building. Described as a “wildly innovative and controversial postmodern landmark,” the hefty building, rising from a heavy four-story base, has facades of diverse designs, clad with strongly colored tiles—brown, blues, and terra-cotta—against an ivory background. The square windows are relatively small, and they puncture the walls at regular intervals, another denial of the glass curtains of a decade or so before. The symmetrical park front has two huge seven-story pseudocolumns with boxy, floor-height capitals and flutes evoked by vertical bands of windows. Above the central main entrance there is a 40-foot (12-meter) hammered-copper sculpture of “Portlandia” (the female figure on the city seal) by sculptor Raymond Kaskey; it was added in 1985 at Graves’s initiative. Around the corners, the facade is adorned at the tenth-floor level with a stylized swag of blue ribbons, made of concrete: on one, they hang sedately in place; on the other they appear to be blowing in the wind. Inside the building, Graves used the same colors as the exterior (a decision that provoked some criticism); he also designed the furnishing textiles and other details for the offices. Since 1995, the building’s structural problems have become evident and are worsening. Despite costly repairs, the building may soon become unsafe to use.

London’s underground railroad system, popularly known as “the Tube,” is the oldest in the world. As early as the 1830s Charles Pearson, the city of London’s solicitor, suggested that the mainline stations could be linked by an underground railroad with as many as eight tracks. Despite the potential economic and social advantages of the scheme, it could find no financial backing, and Parliament refused to approve it. The city’s first above-ground passenger service was the London and Greenwich line, opened in February 1836. Within four years it was carrying nearly 6 million passengers annually between the major mainline train stations on the borders of the metropolis and the edge of the central business district. With an area of 60 square miles (154 square kilometers) and a population of 2.5 million, Greater London was then the world’s largest city, and the most crowded, plagued by street congestion.

To find a solution to a worsening problem, the City Terminus Company (CTC) revived the underground railroad idea in 1852 and placed it before Parliament, only to again fail. The following year the Bayswater, Paddington, and Holborn Bridge Railway Company submitted a plan for a different line, ostensibly at half the cost. Parliament endorsed the North Metropolitan line in 1853, and the company promptly had the CTC line approved as part of its own. The Great Western Railway Company agreed to finance construction of the underground in return for direct access to the city. In 1854 an act of Parliament was obtained to begin the Metropolitan Railroad. A sum of £1 million was raised by December 1859, and the following February the first shafts were sunk. The earliest tunnels were made by the “cut and cover” method: a deep trench would be excavated, side walls and roof built, and the ground surface backfilled. The process was expensive and slow, and it created chaos along the route of the railroad, not least of which was the dispossession of citizens and the demolition of buildings, often the homes of the poor. The first trial run was on 24 May 1862, and on 10 January 1863 the Metropolitan Railway opened, the world’s first underground line, between Bishop’s Road, Paddington, and Farringdon Street. There were 38,000 passengers on that first day, and from that moment the London Underground began to grow. In 1868 the first section of the Metropolitan District Railroad from South Kensington to Westminster was opened.

It was soon realized that, a citywide underground network must eventually pass beneath the River Thames. “Cut and cover” methods would not be appropriate to build such lines, but an “old” technology was already in place. Completed in 1843, Marc and Isambard Brunel’s Thames Tunnel had been dug using the former’s tunneling shield, patented in 1818. The machine had been improved in fifty years, and the engineer James Henry Greathead finally built a
lighter and (more importantly) circular version. In 1870, with one Peter Barlow, he drilled the 6-foot-diameter (1.83-meter) Tower Subway Tunnel from Tower Hill to Vine Lane. Its system of elevators and a twelve-seat car, all wound by steam-operated wire cable, was unreliable, and within months it was reduced to a pedestrian passage. Although extremely short-lived, it was the first tube railroad, and the construction method obviated all the disadvantages of “cut and cover.” Greathead’s tunneling machine had a diaphragm within, which segments of the cylindrical, cast-iron tunnel lining were bolted together as the excavator was advanced hydraulically; the gap between the excavation and the lining was filled with cement grout. Because it was circular in cross section, the tube was structurally stronger.

The next route to be completed was the Circle line in 1884. At that time all trains were drawn by steam locomotives, filling the tunnels with smoke and fumes. Steam trains could not operate in the deeper tunnels, and after considering cable-hauled cars, the decision was made to employ electric traction. Most of the transition took place in the first decade of the twentieth century, although the world’s first successful electric tube route, the City and South London Railway, was opened in December 1890. In 1902 an American, Charles Tyson Yerkes, financed the expansion of the network and by 1907 five new lines—Central, Northern City, Bakerloo, Piccadilly, and Charing Cross Euston and Hampstead—were opened, and electrification proceeded. Yerkes formed the Underground Electric Railway Company of London (known as the Underground Group). Between 1902 and 1905, they built the world’s largest power station, at Chelsea, to electrify the District line. Powering the Tube for almost a century, it was closed in 2000 when the Underground moved to the national grid. By 1913, mergers had brought all lines except the Metropolitan, into the group.

Underground services expanded from 1907 through the 1930s. In 1933 the Underground Group and the Metropolitan Railway were subsumed by the London Passenger Transport Board, which managed all public transport systems in the London area. Following World War II (when no fewer than eighty Underground stations served as air-raid shelters for Londoners), the Passenger Transport Board was nationalized and renamed the London Transport Executive, which in turn became the London Transport Board. More administrative changes began in May 2000, with the establishment of Transport for London, an executive body of the Greater London Authority.

In September 1968 the first section, of the Victoria line was opened, and extensions were completed by 1971. In May 1979 the Jubilee line opened, bringing the total number of routes beneath London to eleven: Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, East London, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, and Waterloo and City. Upgrades and improvements continue. Recently, computer signaling was introduced; the Central line was modernized and the Victoria line converted to automatic operation. The most significant addition to the complex system, begun in 1993, was the construction of the £1.9 billion (U.S.$2.8 billion) Jubilee line extension, the largest engineering project undertaken in Europe since the Channel Tunnel. Completed in May 1999, the new route from Westminster Station to Stratford via North Greenwich (to serve the Millennium Dome) involved negotiating the already crowded undercity with its myriad railroad tunnels, cables, drains, and service ducts, as well as overcoming subsidence problems.

Nearly 80 percent of Londoners working in central London travel to work on public transport, most of them on the Tube. Trains traveling at an average speed (including stops) of 20.6 mph (33 kph) move a total of almost a billion passengers annually over a multilevel underground network—some tubes reach 221 feet (67.4 meters) deep—that extends 45 miles (72 kilometers) east to west and 28 miles (45 kilometers) north to south. The first underground railroad in the world, which began with a track a mere 3.57 miles (5.7 kilometers) long, now covers 250 miles (392 kilometers); 42 percent of that is in tunnels.

The Dynamic Tower, the world's first building in motion, takes the concept of green buildings to the next level were it will generate electricity for itself as well as other nearby buildings, making it the first skyscraper designed to be self powered.
The building generates electricity from wind turbines mounted horizontally between each floor, eighty story building will have up to seventy nine wind turbines, making it a true green power plant while traditional vertical wind turbines have some environmental negative impact, including obstruction of views and the need for roads to build and maintain them, the Dynamic Tower's wind turbines are practically invisible and extremely quiet due to their special shape and the carbon fibre material they are made of.
Another environmentally green element of the Dynamic Tower is the photovoltaic cells that will be placed on the roof of each rotating floor to produce solar energy, approximately 20% of each roof will be exposed to the sun, so a building that has 80 roofs will equal the roofing space of 10 similar size buildings.
In addition, natural and recyclable materials including stone, marble, glass and wood will be used for the interior finishing.
To further improve the energy efficiency of the Dynamic Tower, insulated glass and structural insulating panels will be employed.
Energy will also be saved during construction, which involves pre-fabricating individual units in a factory, this Fisher Method not only reduces construction time, but it also results in a cleaner construction site with limited noise, dust, fumes and waste, the shorter building time also results in a less energy consumption than traditional construction methods.

Reichstag, Berlin, Germany; Foster and Partners, architects, 1993–1999. Interior of glass dome, showing the inverted cone used for climate and lighting control.

The restored Reichstag in Berlin, designed by the London architectural firm of Foster and Partners, epitomizes a new kind of architecture—one that respects the physical and cultural environment and takes account of the past while assuming responsibility for the future.

The institution known as the Reichstag was set up in 1867 by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to allow the bourgeoisie to have a role in the politics of the new empire, a confederation of princely states under the King of Prussia. From 1871 the Reichstag met in a disused factory until a neo-Renaissance building (1882–1894) was created for it by the Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot. After the reunification in 1990, the new Germany’s Parliament, comprising the two houses known as the Bundestag and Bundestat, made Berlin the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in June 1991. It also voted, by a small majority, to move its own seat from Bonn to Berlin, locating it in the historic building.

The monument was in a sorry state and held memories of the failure of the Weimar Republic and the disastrous Third Reich. Before the notorious Berlin Wall came down, it was cut off from the old center, just outside the boundary; now it is in the middle of the city. The Reichstag building had been patched up in the cold war years, and the facades and the interior underwent desultory restoration in the 1960s. It was used as a historical museum between 1958 and 1972, and spasmodically for meetings of the West German Parliament. In June 1992 an international architectural competition was held to restore the Reichstag, and eighty architects submitted proposals.

Following some debate and a second stage of the competition among the three shortlisted entries, Foster and Partners were awarded the commission in July 1993. The consulting engineers were Leonhardt Andra and Partner, the Ove Arup Partnership, and Schlaich Bergermann and Partner. The Foster partnership originally proposed a huge mesh canopy supported on columns to enclose Wallot’s building and extend it into the Platz der Republik. Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank’s urban plan for the Spreebogen district of Berlin, the result of a contemporary competition, set the framework for new buildings and called for a rebriefing and consequent changes to the design. Building work began in July 1995 and the new Reichstag was opened in April 1999; it cost DM 600 million (approximately U.S.$330 million).

According to the architects, their final design was constrained by four factors: the history of the Reichstag, which in its earliest days had symbolized liberty; the day-to-day processes of the Parliament; questions of ecology and energy: and (naturally) the economics of the project. Because Wallot’s building was to be preserved as far as possible, the Reichstag is a living historical museum that frankly shows the scars of its past—pockmarks caused by shells, charred timber, and Russian graffiti from the post–World War II occupation are all left visible. Because it was believed that the processes of democracy should be transparent, Wallot’s formal west entrance was reopened to serve for all users of the building, politicians and public alike. The great steps lead to a tall, top-lit narthex; on entering, the visitor is confronted by a glass wall that defines the lobby; beyond that, another transparent partition gives a view into the parliamentary chamber. Members of the public may occupy public balconies or follow interlocking spiral ramps to a viewing deck that looks down into the chamber from within the cupola. The functional needs of the Parliament required the demolition of many of the accretions of the earlier refurbishment.

Visually and structurally, the design is dominated by a new glass-and-steel hemispherical cupola at the center of the restored building, which replaces and evokes the war-damaged original dome, removed in 1954. But the cupola is more than an esthetic or symbolic choice. At its center a curving, inverted cone of mirrors reflects daylight into the plenary chamber. The cupola is fitted with a movable sunscreen: in summer it tracks and blocks the sun to prevent overheating of the interior; in winter it is set aside to allow warming sunshine to penetrate into the building. The cone also acts as a convection chimney; fresh air enters the building through air shafts and rises through the floor of the chamber. As it heats up it is drawn into the cone, and an extractor expels it from the building. An aquifer at a depth of 100 feet (30 meters) stores cold water that is circulated through pipes in the Reichstag’s floors and ceilings in the summer. Warmed in the process, the water is then pumped into another subterranean lake, 1,000 feet (300 meters) beneath Berlin. At that depth it retains its heat, and in winter the process is reversed to heat the building. The Reichstag power plant that drives the pumps is fueled by renewable grape seed oil. In the 1960s the restored Reichstag emitted 7,700 tons (7,000 tonnes) of carbon dioxide a year; the new building emits 440 tons. Germany has been a world leader in energy conservation, and the building that now symbolizes national unity fittingly exemplifies that mind-set.