Green CAD?
Autodesk has a new sustainable design initiative, which includes a PBS series, and a website at http://www.autodesk-centers.com/green/.
I went to the website, and I have to say that I'm truly impressed with the presentation. It's compelling, and beautifully put together. It talks about sustainable design, environmentally-intelligent development, and thinking green. It includes a number of interesting stories where people used AutoCAD to achieve these goals.
Yes, AutoCAD.
I'm slightly mystified by this. One of the basic tenets of green building design is that you have to go beyond mere drafting, and actually model the design before actually starting to build. The building model is the starting point for simulation of energy use, ecological impact, and every other meaningful vector in sustainable design.
No matter that it's the most popular CAD application in the world, AutoCAD, by itself, does not provide the underpinnings necessary to do green building design. Autodesk Architectural Desktop and Revit both provide some capabilities for green design -- but none of the stories on the website (at least, none that I saw) talked about Architectural Desktop or Revit. They talked about plain old AutoCAD. (One story did talk about Autodesk Inventor -- though it seemed to be incidental to the overall story.)
I think talking about using AutoCAD for green building design is rather like talking about using SUVs for saving energy. It's just not the right tool for the job. While I applaud Autodesk's initiative in starting to talk about sustainable design, it seems to me that, compared to competitors such as Bentley and Graphisoft, they're way behind the curve in actually providing the tools to do it.
Evan Yares
1 Comment
Reader Comments (1)
I think you miss the point that Autodesk is eluding to, and they don't elaborate on it as much as they should. You can use any software or a stick in the dirt to draft a "green" building. After having spent the last 2 years in the architectual field, "green" is still in the hands of the architect not the software. The software is not going to tell the architect where to use recyled material, its not going to tell him where to use material with low outgassing. Its a discipline that the architect must learn to use and how to apply it.
I think the underlying presentation of the Adesk website is to promote aesthetically and enviromentally pleasing "green" architecture. Planting grass on the roof doesn't make a building "green", its what's inside that matters.
Mike