AECtech 2022 | NYC

About AEC Tech

Each year, Thornton Tomasetti hosts New York City’s AEC Tech, welcoming technology professionals from the architecture, engineering and construction industry and beyond. Since its creation in 2013, it has evolved from a two-day conference into a four-day experience featuring professional development workshops, speakers, presentations and a 24-to-30-hour hackathon. We strive to offer the most enriching workshops in the latest technologies, engage industry leaders and provide a forum for project growth, development and networking.

By serving as a space where creative minds can devise new technologies, acquire skills and make new connections, AEC Tech is helping build an open community of knowledge sharing to promote industry progression and enhance collaboration and communication.

About CORE studio

CORE studio is Thornton Tomasetti’s virtual incubator of ideas. Its name derives from the union of computational modeling and research and development, which are at the core of our firm’s mission. Our team is a diverse assortment of specialists, with each member bringing expert knowledge and an inquisitive mind to projects of every size and scope. Our experience working across all Thornton Tomasetti practices affords us unique insight into the needs of – and solutions for – our clients and our firm.

CORE studio provides a valuable interface among design and construction teams, developing new workflows and processes that promote collaboration and enhance building design. Our analyses of today’s practices allow us to envision the optimized workflows of tomorrow.

Bringing the community together in person and to the virtual world.

AECtech 2022 NYC was the tenth annual event and our largest yet in both scope and participation. Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio was excited to host a six day gathering of thought leaders from over 25 companies and organizations . This year featured 11 Virtual and 6 In Person Masterclasses hosted from experts from around the world. This year AECtech introduced a new event called the Tech Crawl where 6 local architecture and engineering firms welcomed guests to their offices to discuss how they approach innovation and apply technology with their practice. This lead up to this year’s Full Day Symposium live-streamed from the Center for Architecture in NYC where 22 presenters and panelists shared their insights and innovations. The event finished strong with a 27-hour hackathon that produced 14 uniquely innovative projects.

Contributors

A huge thank you to everyone who Contribued to make this year’s AECtech possible!

Full

Half

Full Day Classes

Half Day Classes

Tech Crawl

AECtech 2022 was excited to introduce a new event this year, the Tech Crawl. Over 60 participants visited 3 pairs of local Engineering & Architecture Firms to tour their offices and learn about innovative processes that distinguish their practice. The evening concluded with a Social Event at Thornton Tomasetti’s offices.

Symposium

MVRDV

Sanne Van Der Burgh | Associate Director, Head Of Mvrdv Next

Suffolk Construction

Jit Kee Chin | Chief Data & Innovation Officer, Executive Vice President

Chris Lanzisera | Vice President, Suffolk Illuminate

CORE studio

Sila Gulgec | Senior Project Engineer

Seyedomid Sajedi | Ai Engineer

David Mans | Senior Associate Applications Developer

TVS Design

Michael Hodge | Principal, Digital Practice/Design Technology

Emilio Hernandez | Director Of Design Copmutation

Nvidia

Cobus Bothma | Nvidia Omniverse

Heatherwick Studio

Pablo Zamorano Mosnaim | Senior Associate, Head Of Geometry And Computational Design

Zahner

James Coleman | Vice President ,Innovation & R&D At Zahner

Perkins & Will

Nick Cameron | Principal, Digital Practice Director

Foster + Partners

Martha Tsigkari | Senior Partner, Head Of Applied R+D

Sergey Pigach | CORE studio

Brian Furtaw | Nvidia

Martha Tsigkari | Foster + Partners

Pablo Zamorano Mosnaim |

Heatherwick Studio

Harness | Testfit.io

Hackathon

CONGRATULATIONS to our WINNERS!

Best Overall Hack: Crash!

Real Time Rhino Collaboration.

Team

Curtis Wensley, McNeel Morteza Karimi, McNeel Russell Feathers, CORE studio Erika Santos, AECOM Moustafa El-Sawy, AECOM Callum Sykes, StructureCraf Lukas Fuhrimann, StructureCraft

Best Open Source: Dreamhopper

A new Paradigm in 3D Modelling

Team

Francisco Landeros, INFORM Studio

Pedro Cortes, McNeel

Alfredo Chavez, Heatherwick Studio

Nathaniel Steinrueck, AIA Sergey Pigach, CORE studio

Juan Arredondo, Columbia University

Jeffrey Moser, Grimshaw

Pablo Zamorano, Heatherwick Studio Sasha Geremia, CORE studio

Best Collaboration: REmap

Reconciling as-design and as-built, parametric logic in the real world.

Team

James Coleman, Zahner

Brian Gillespie, McNeel

Burçin Nalıncı, Zahner Nathan Barnes, Zahner Quoc Dang

Hackathon

Thanks to all the project teams!

VAEttle

Performance Design Space Exploration: A Generalized Workflow

Zhenxiang Huang, Vincent Mai, Daniel Gaspar, Mark Membreno, Mohsin Afsar, JP Mendez-Ruiz, Paul Laroque, Mitsu Kuroki, Peter Zhang

ShapeMaker

What if designers could encapsulate design logic online and execute smart components in a geolocated contextual analysis environment?

Alexander Schiftner, Ardeshir Aliaskari, Håkon Disse, Jeroen Janssen, Kjetil Kristoffersen, Krzysztof Jedrzejewski, Magnus Wang, Oscar Borgstrom, Pål Moen Møst, Zach Kron

Skjematest

What if designers could get office building layouts at lighting speed and understand the environment impact all at once?

Ryan Griege, Luke Minnich, Clifton Harness, Nat MacDonald, Kjetil Kristoffersen, Magnus Wang, Zach Kron

Difference Machine

Calculating

differences

between BIM models

Augustina Aboy, Ben Ferrer, Christopher Diggins, Matt Shelp, Nick Bowker, Nick Mundell, Sophie Moore

DevHops

Visual programming interface with kanban for project management

Marcin Kosicki, Jo Kamm, Justyna Szychowska, Anders Rod, Chuck Driesler

ConfigAR

Making it possible to visualize configurable designs in the real world using nothing else but your phone.

Ben Fortunato, Elcin Ertugrul, Alice Huang, Val Tzvetkov, Luke Gehron, Knut Tjensvoll, Rolando Villen, Atishay Lahr, Gokul Gupta

Project-Vibe

Fix 2d floor plan mis-alignment assuming the floor plan as a graph data structure, in which rooms are nodes and adjacencies are edges.

Brandon Pachuca, Hailey Kim, Robert Wang, Nanami Santa Cruz, Sandra Cai, Atharva Ranade, Tamaho Shigemura

Seism-Sim

Using Unity and C# to develop a program to visualize game-effect building’s time history response under an earthquake curve.

Xianqiao Yang, Matt Conway, Melissa Bidegain Yeung, Andres Roncal, Kenny Tam

GraFix

Fix 2d floor plan mis-alignment assuming the floor plan as a graph data structure, in which rooms are nodes and adjacencies are edges.

Yankun Yang, Seyedomid Sajed, Sila Gulgec, Yuan-Tung Chou, Mostapha Roudsari, Mingbo Peng, Taro Narahara, Alireza Memarian

Vis-an

Harvesting design insight from visualization models

Devang Chauhan