ICT Spaghetti by Business Advantage Group plc

Freedom Tower Rises from the Ashes of Ground Zero

Described at a recent London press conference by Paul Seletsky, Digital Design Director at Architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), as a "mast for lower Manhattan as the Empire State Building is a mast for mid-town", the so called Freedom.		Tower will rise to a total elevation, at the tip of its antenna, of 1,776 feet.
		Paul Seletsky
Recaptures New York Skyline As the first office tower to be built on the actual World Trade Center site, the Freedom Tower will be the tallest building in the nation and will give new shape to New York City's skyline when it is completed in 2009. Formed in 1936 SOM is one of the leading architecture, urban design and planning, engineering and interior architecture firms in the United States. SOM have done big stuff before; they were the folks behind America's currently largest structure, the Sears Tower in Chicago.
	"Creating and then working in a single, comprehensive, digital model of the Freedom Tower has been a process revolution," said Carl Galioto, partner at SOM's New York office. "Once we started using Revit on the project, our teams were hooked. They could explore and evaluate design options much more effortlessly than ever before." Buzzsaw, Autodesk's web based collaboration and documentation management tool has enabled SOM, according to Seletsky, "….to use the Internet as a live collaborative venture."
The base of the Freedom Tower goes 200 feet underground and provides for 11 storeys of subterranean shopping and public spaces as well access to the subway trains. Revit and Buzzsaw Selected From a competitive software selection process that included rival solutions such as Bentley Microstation and Graphisoft Archicad, SOM chose Autodesk Revit Building with its associated collaborative tool Buzzsaw as the design and documentation solution for the project.	Has the Built Environment caught up with the Mechanical? Commenting at the press conference on Revit, Autodesk's Building Information Modelling tool, Paul Seletsky said that modelling the building is now like modelling a car, "each component can be identified in the same way as you can for your car." It has long been the case that the Architectural Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector has felt left behind the Mechanical CAD (MCAD) market in terms of being able to take advantage of parametric 3D modelling technology. Now, with products like Revit this imbalance looks like it is being redressed. We will leave the last word to Paul Seletsky's 4th grade son who apparently suggested that the next step would be holographs that we can move around and change at will.

All pictures courtesy of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP and used with permission. Business Advantage has provided research and business development services to companies in the IT and technical computing sector since its formation in 1993.