Green Building Research

Realizing the Vision

Project Chicago, introduced at the U.S. Green Building Council's Greenbuild 2007 conference and shown below, envisioned the future of sustainable design technology. Now, Autodesk can illustrate how much of the vision is achievable today.

Our 2008 video, “Realizing the Vision,” tells the story of the design of a LEED Platinum city hall for the community of Greensburg, Kansas. The town of Greensburg was destroyed by a tornado in May 2007, and the community is determined to become an entirely sustainable city. The video shows how sophisticated technology can be used to create and analyze highly sustainable designs and achieve important factors for LEED certification.

BNIM Architects, designers for the city hall and many other civic buildings in Greensburg, employed a building information modeling (BIM) process to create and analyze design alternatives and better predict performance in terms of energy use, water use, daylighting, and other key factors. Visualization of the model provides insight into the effect of design decisions on the actual experience of the space in terms of light and thermal comfort.

The video shows a set of tools that Autodesk provides for building information modeling and sustainable design analysis. The following products are illustrated in the video:

• Revit® Architecture
• Revit® MEP
• Revit® Structure
• Autodesk® Seek
• Autodesk® Ecotect™
• Autodesk® Green Building Studio®
• Autodesk® 3ds Max®

Project Chicago: Green Building Research

Autodesk and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) are committed to a future where design process and technology are integrated in support of our common goal: a sustainable tomorrow.

In 2007, the Project Chicago: Green Building Research team investigated how modeling, analysis, and sustainable validation could converge into an improved design process. See how an instant and interactive means to evaluate innovation, water, energy, indoor environmental quality, and carbon footprint elements could give designers an immediate sense of the results of different design scenarios.

Using scenarios from BNIM Architects’ Lewis and Clark State Office Building in Missouri, a research team of experts developed alternative concepts for sustainable design environments and studied their impact on the design process. This video showing the results of this research suggests a compelling future.

Key to this eco-friendly building effort is the integrated process known as building information modeling (BIM), an integrated process built on coordinated, reliable information about a project from design through construction, and into operations.

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