Only 10 days left for early registration! Also check out our updated speaker list and the details on AIA/PDH credits. Join us this September for the 2011 Symposium on Wood Engineering, Architecture and Construction at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Presentations will cover passivehouse technology, environmental benefits of using wood and new, innovative wood building [...]

When I went to the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States in Mountain View, CA this July, I had the chance to present two projects that I have worked on in the recent past here at the University of Massachusetts. “Building a 3D World” The first presentation was on our campus modeling project in [...]

While I am semi-comfortably seated on my United Airlines flight and traversing all three North-American time zones on my way back to Massachusetts, it’s time to recap what happened at the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States over the last two and a half days*. Overall summary: Wow, was that ever great fun!!! If [...]

We now have the symposium website and the registration up and running – feel free to browse it and make sure you tell all your colleagues about it. The 2011 Wood Structures Symposium will be an exciting venue with experts from the University of Innsbruck in Austria presenting on Passivehouse construction and Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) [...]

For a few days now local news here in Amherst has been dominated by the report of a killed biker on Montague Road. This tragedy has been exacerbated by the sad fact that the car that hit the two bikers has not yet been found and that the driver has not faced consequences for his [...]

Two interesting news items: CASE architects have developed an interesting whitepaper for Autodesk that illustrates nicely the conceptual design process in Revit 2010. In this paper, a highrise development is taken from the conceptual stage through some Ecotect solar analysis all the way to facade panelization using the new Revit tools. You can download the [...]

Given all the web work I have been doing in the recent past, it feels good every once in a while to create something that gets printed. So here’s my latest project – an announcement postcard for the 2008 Wood Structures Symposium to be held at UMass in Amherst, MA. Above is the front and [...]

After the “Sustainability vs. Homeland Security” graph from my last post, I somehow feel that I could present another one. This one illustrates visit statistics for one of my course websites. I have 60 students in that class, which is properly reflected in the in-semester weekly number of unique visitors. Look below what happens when [...]

So far I have used SketchUp for a lot of things, but a 50-minute presentation wasn’t among those. Besides, one of the big no-no’s for "classic" Powerpoint presentations is having too much happen on-screen (flying-in arrows and the like). Given the dynamic 3D interface of SketchUp I was curious if flying around inside its space [...]

These are some impressions from the graduate commencement 2007 at UMass. I am just showing a very small portion of the ceremonies (which were extensive, well organized and beautifully ceremonious) – look for more pictures of the festivities to appear soon on the UMass site. Protests during the 2007 UMass Graduate Commencement