Mar 18, 2015 11:57 am | Guest Author By Martyn Horne, Member of the UK Landscape Institute’s BIM Working Group Landscape architects and designers may view Building Information Modeling (BIM) as something specific to architects. However, BIM isn’t a piece of software or a file format revolving around architectural structures; it’s a series of workflows enabled by information technology that can be used to create anything in the built environment. The “Building” in BIM isn’t a noun, as in “the building,” but a verb, as in “to build.” Understanding this twist of language opens many doors for landscape professionals to improve how they do business. 
Early white card visual and sun study of the BIM model, showing main site elements. The key aim of BIM is to facilitate collaboration, communication, and effective data exchange between different members of a construction team, which occurs even without an existing building in a 3D model. There is still a wealth of information regarding the site in the model and its linked 2D plans, including elevations, sections, and construction schedules. Landscape BIM can be used to conduct a water flow analysis, or a minimum and maximum grading analysis; find water volumes; create tree surveys and tree protection plans, planting schedules, material quantities, and maintenance reports; and detect clashes with underground services like sewage and electrical equipment. All of this information can live within one 3D model, providing a valuable resource for every party involved in the development of a site from the designer to the construction team to the owner. 
Same BIM model in Plan showing Water Flow Analysis mode. Both images generated in Vectorworks Landmark with Renderworks. BIM will undoubtedly require landscape professionals to learn new processes and acquire new skills. But this is an exciting time for the entire construction industry, including landscape architecture, and by embracing this new technology, we can increase technical efficiency and make more time for creativity and design. For more information about incorporating BIM into your landscape workflow, visit the Landscape Institute website. The post Landscape Professionals: Look at BIM as a Verb, Not a Noun appeared first on Planet Vectorworks.
  
Mar 17, 2015 11:51 am | Pete Hicks 
Studio Roberto Rovira’s Sky Lounge Pavilion at Florida International University in Miami. Photo by Manuel Perez-Trujillo. Landscape architect Robert Rovira leads a firm that is “detail-oriented, artistically obsessive, technically-inclined, and rarely satisfied in their mission to improve the built environment.” It’s this passion and vision that earned him a place among this year’s Emerging Voices, one of the most coveted honors in North American architecture. Awarded to eight up-and-coming firms and designers whose “voices” positively influence the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism through their professional and academic works, the Emerging Voices are selected through an invited, juried competition held by The Architectural League of New York. The chosen practitioners’ realized works are not only the best of the best, but they also address larger environmental or social issues within the built environment. Rovira, a Vectorworks software user, is now a part of this prestigious lineup of creative visionaries. Rovira, founder of Studio Roberto Rovira and chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at Florida International University, has a background in design, engineering, and fine arts. His firm is dedicated to creating projects of “uncompromising design quality that work at the edge of the built and the natural.” His investigative approach seeks to engage a project’s end-users by discovering connections between ecology, patterns, history, and time, and it caught the attention of the Emerging Voices jury. Rovira’s recent work includes the Sky Lounge Pavilion at Florida International University in Miami, which received an Award of Merit for Divine Detail at the AIA-Miami 60th Annual Design Awards, and Magnolia North Park in Opa Locka, Florida, which received the American Planning Association Florida Award of Excellence in 2014. Congratulations to Rovira and all of this year’s winners. Learn more about their work, as well as the work of past years’ winners, at The Architectural League of New York website. The post Visionary: Roberto Rovira Receives 2015 Emerging Voice Honor appeared first on Planet Vectorworks.
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