Today at the AIA expo in New Orleans, aside from mind-blowing architectural and building products and finishes ideal for a number of church applications, the WF Designer staff spotted a movement among companies and manufacturers. It's this: collaborative efforts aren't just reserved for design and building methodologies, such as Integrated Project Delivery and Design-Build. Similar integrated efforts are making their way into products and resources as tools for the architects that design churches.
In yesterday's blog, I told you how Autodesk, maker of Revit Building Information Modeling software, for example, was working to offer a full suite of products that works alongside BIM to deliver all the visualization elements that a church architect, for example, might want to offer to a church client along the pathway of conceptual design to actual construction. Today, we spoke with Bayer MaterialScience's daylighting and materials people, as well as their strategic business development folks. We learned that Bayer has put together a strategic partnership of companies that will work together to help architects understand and access a range of services, products and companies that can help them achieve more environmentally sustainable buildings heading into the future. Twenty years from now, the Bayer experts report, LEED will not even be what people are striving for -- the level of environmental sustainability will likely surpass a LEED platinum certified level, for example. So, much like architects, engineers, consultants, builders and other designers are seeing the benefits of working collaboratively from the get-go on building design -- to save time and money and to increase environmental sustainability in the long run -- architects can now choose from resources that also pool together some of the best and brightest thinking in building design and renovation ... before they even begin the collaborative design process. This, to me, is the essence of thinking ahead. And this spells tremendous potential benefit for church design and building, where thinking environmental measures and demonstrated sustainability can model an intense level of creation care to community members where a church resides.
HP, too, is getting in on the act in its product line of printers for architects, looking ahead to designers' needs for quick and easily accessible reprographic printing-type capabilities. The company's new portfolio of web-connected printers, for example, allows everyone involved in the design, from office to office -- no matter where they reside -- to print detailed architectural documents, such as those generated in BIM or more traditional measures, by connecting their smart phone or other USB device up to the printer and sending the command. Again, the message seems to be about getting everyone on the same page from the very beginning, working out the details, and moving forward confidently and more cost-effectively. That illustrates the beauty of collaboration, on many levels.
