Working on the NHL Winter Classic, Pepsi Fan Jam, MTV’s Iggy Awards, and A-list concerts is just another day at the office for the Performance Environment Design Group LLC (PEDG), a team of creative professionals who orchestrate structural, scenic, lighting, video, motion, and compositional details from offices in Lancaster, PA and Los Angeles, CA. Their transformational designs have yielded industry accolades, and they are repeatedly tapped by the same clients for their attention to detail and quality work.

PEDG uses the Vectorworks Designer program to manage all aspects of production, including occupancies, as well as scenic, audio, and video elements. Courtesy of Brian Friedman for iHeartRadio.

We recently spent some time with three members of PEDG’s creative team to learn how they employ Vectorworks Designer software to achieve success. The result is a new case study that launches into PEDG’s work on Clear Channel’s 2012 iHeartRadio event at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The article describes how the design team got the two-day event off the ground while mediating challenges associated with the sheer logistics of accommodating 22 top-tier artists, improving upon the previous year’s show with a similar budget, and meeting a tight timeline.

The backdrop for the NFL Kickoff 2012 was New York’s world-renowned Rockefeller Center. By night, it was a world unto itself where NFL-logoed lights beamed onto the buildings beyond in dramatic fashion. Courtesy of Meteor Tower.

The story continues, detailing how a mere two-and-a-half weeks before the iHeartRadio Music Festival, PEDG pulled off another equally amazing set with the NFL Kickoff. Marking the official start to the professional football season, this event celebrates the previous Super Bowl winner’s hometown. In 2012, singer Mariah Carey and the band No Doubt made the 2012 show at New York’s Rockefeller Center a hit.

Read about PEDG’s dramatic transformation of this world-renowned setting and the rest of story by clicking here.

Congratulations to Joseph Wyman, AIA, the second winner of a Wacom Intuos5 pen tablet in our Vectorworks: From Sketch to BIM giveaway. As we mentioned in our story on Monday, this project will demonstrate how to transform a hand-drawn sketch into a Building Information Model (BIM). Members of the public can help determine the project’s scope by voting on key details for each phase. Wyman was entered into the drawing by casting his vote in Phase 1 to select a project type.

About the Winner

Joseph Wyman

Wyman is owner of ARQEON architecture in Sydney, Australia. His firm is primarily a residential architecture practice, with a focus on high quality, innovation, and energy efficiency.

“My design philosophy is based on the basic principles of good architectural design taught at my architecture school,” says Wyman. He cited the following five principles in detail:

1. Good architecture should aim to provide an interesting, varied, and stimulating spatial experience and transitions of mystery and surprise moving through and around the building.
2. Views should be controlled and designed as part of the spatial experience of moving through the interior and external spaces of the building.
3. Considerations of aspect and orientation of the building’s siting are paramount to achieve the principles of passive environmental comfort in terms of daylight penetration in winter and shading in summer, maximize heat gain in winter and minimize heat gain in summer and to capture and create views from within the building.
4. Contextualize the building in terms of the surrounding landscape or urban fabric and, importantly, relate the building and its components to human scale.
5. Reflect the client’s personality, style, family, or organizational culture and structure and comprehensively achieve the functional, budgetary, and time program set out by the client brief.

An elevation drawing of a recent award-winning beach house project at Whale Beach, New South Wales.

“I begin a design concept by analyzing the orientation, aspect, and levels of the site and considering the basic relationships of the spatial program,” he added. “This can be in the form of very loose sketches on paper, which are then followed up by loose thick colored lines on a sketch layer in Vectorworks software. These sketches are developed in more detail using more precise layers and initial client presentation plans and elevations rendered in Sketch mode to give the impression of being hand drawn and preliminary to generate further discussion in a more relaxed nontechnical mode with the clients.”

A photo of the completed Whale Beach house.

Nemetschek Vectorworks is giving away Wacom Intuos5 pen tablets at each phase of the Vectorworks: From Sketch to BIM project. Visit the site today to vote and enter for your chance to win!

Congratulations to Carolina Garcia, who won a Wacom Intuos5 pen tablet in the Vectorworks: From Sketch to BIM giveaway. Through this project, the Vectorworks design team is demonstrating how to transform a hand-drawn sketch into a Building Information Model (BIM). Members of the public can help determine the project’s scope by voting on key details for each phase.

Garcia was entered into the drawing by casting her vote in Phase 1 to select a project type. An Eco Resort was the winner. Currently, visitors to the Sketch to BIM site can vote on Phase 2 by selecting the conceptual sketch they’d like to see designed.

Carolina Garcia

About the Winner

Carolina Garcia, PLA, LEED AP BD+C, is both the owner of Culturelle3 Designs, Inc. and a career services advisor at Harrington College of Design in Chicago, Illinois. Her firm offers services in landscape architecture, architecture/design consulting, and research for residential, commercial, civic, and institutional facilities markets.

“My design philosophy is to create spaces inspired by history, culture, and nature,” she says. “I focus on multiple dimensions in order to create spaces that offer a variety of experiences for the user. My design concepts always begin with research, either for inspiration or finding out what was on the site before.” She specialized in cultural landscapes while in graduate school at U of I Urbana-Champaign. “I’ve taken that interest and applied it to my projects in such a way that cultural and historical components are part of the early research and design phase. This also gets me thinking about sustainable ideas for the project so the site is revived and reconnected to its cultural values.”

Garcia says she sketches design concepts by hand but also uses software early in her design process. “Having a 3D massing model or simple rendering really explains to the client what the designer’s vision is and it helps to solve issues or see details that 2D drawings don’t convey clearly,” she says.

Garcia joined a team of architects and engineers earlier this year to develop a design for the Infill Philadelphia: Soak It Up competition, which illustrates sustainable alternatives to stormwater treatment in a commercial site.

How does she balance her design practice with her role at Harrington College of Design? “As a career advisor at Harrington, I assist students in developing their career goals while in school and once they graduate,” she says. “Being a designer myself allows me to share my experiences with them and provide some insight into what’s trending in the design industry. The beauty of being a designer is having the ability to adapt. For me it’s been a nice balance because while I don’t get to sketch or design on a daily basis, I still get to learn and apply my knowledge to both my career advising and design projects.”

Nemetschek Vectorworks is giving away Wacom Intuos5 pen tablets at each phase of the Vectorworks: From Sketch to BIM project. Visit the site today to vote and enter for your chance to win!

Beginning May 18, visitors to Jacksons Fencing in Kent in the U.K. can view seven award-winning gardens at Jacksons 4th Annual Show Gardens Opening. Displays include the Seaside garden, winner of the first Jacksons Fencing garden design competition and designed by Joanne Winn of Joanne Winn Garden Design.

Rendering of the design for the Seaside garden.

The Seaside garden has undergone a slight redesign and will be called the Sanctuary garden for this display. The garden features a large deck and a retreat made with slatted material that allows light into the building. As the competition website describes the plantings, “the garden is softly swathed with layers of tall, lacy flower heads, aloft the shimmering drifts of grasses. Box cubes add structure to the airy planting, emphasizing the form of the building and accentuating the geometry of the garden. The shade is lightened by the pastel and white planting beneath the delicate canopy of a Birch tree.”

Other gardens on display include a preview of the new Whitefriars Show Garden by Lisa Feurtado, which will be installed in Canterbury city center in June, and the Float garden, previously designed by Royal Horticultural Society medal winner Heather Appleton with a new planting scheme by competition winner David Magner.

Nemetschek Vectorworks was proud to be involved in the competition as a sponsor. And, Vectorworks users might recognize some of the Jacksons products from the Jacksons Fencing content library available as part of their Vectorworks Service Select membership.

On May 22, architects in Switzerland will have the opportunity to attend BIM im Klartext at the Architekturforum Zürich. “BIM im Klartext” simply means “BIM in plain language,” and attendees of this event will learn what BIM (Building Information Modeling) is, what the benefits of BIM are, and how BIM is used in Switzerland and other European countries.

The event will feature four presentations by industry educators and professionals, as well as an opening welcome and a summary with moderated questions at the end. The agenda includes the following:

1. Welcome and opening words by Prof. Fritz Häubi
2. “What is BIM? An Introduction” by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Odilo Schoch
3. “Collaboration with BIM in Practice” by David Gubler, Dipl. Arch ETH
4. “From CAD to BIM Planning in Five Steps” by Andy Hängärtner, CAD Expert
5. “Quality Assurance by Building Analysis with Solibri” by Andrés G. Damjanov, Dipl. Architect
6. Summary and concluding questions by Prof. Fritz Häubi

Sponsors of the event include Bern University of Applied Sciences, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Swiss-Architects.com, Solibri, ArchiMedia, and Vectorworks distributor ComputerWorks.

For more information and to register for BIM im Klartext, please click here.

Here is a roundup of Vectorworks tech news from the past month.

Attendees at BIM Show Live 2013 in London learned about the first-ever significant energy modeling and analysis solution for a major architectural BIM program to use the IFC file format. Martyn Horne, business development manager for Computers Unlimited, gave the Tech Forum presentation last week on behalf of Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc. in association with Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES).

Titled “Energy Analysis in the Design Process – An Open BIM Approach,” the presentation demonstrated the benefits of the connection between IES and Vectorworks software and the real-world applications of an Open BIM approach to energy analysis during a project’s design phase.

Martyn Horne presents “Energy Analysis in the Design Process – An Open BIM Approach” at BIM Show Live 2013.

The collaboration between IES and Nemetschek Vectorworks aims to bring viable access to high-quality building model and site data exchange with energy analysis and modeling applications. Some of the partnership’s goals include the following:

• Reinforce the importance and viability of an Open BIM approach in the AEC industry
• Provide an energy analysis and modeling software solution to existing and future Vectorworks users, as well as offer a CAD/BIM application for IES users
• Offer technical improvements to the development of IFC implementation on both sides (which is presently ongoing), leading to better tools and products within the professional AEC market

To learn more about the collaboration between Vectorworks and IES, please click here.

Congratulations to Alan Hanson, winner of the 2013 iSquint.net and Stage Directions Student Lighting Design Competition! Hanson’s design for the musical Chess was selected by the judges as the grand prize winner.

Hanson is a Montana native who has spent years traveling and working in the entertainment industry. He’s finishing his MFA at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) in Lighting Design. After graduation, he hopes to get a job designing, drafting, and rendering somewhere on the West Coast.

Alan Hanson

In addition to Chess, his design work at CCM has been seen in productions of Don Giovanni, Arcadia, The Threepenny Opera, and Parade. He also designs the annual production of The Medora Musical in Medora, North Dakota. He has toured nationally with the Montana Repertory Theatre, Chamber Theatre of Boston, Troupe America Inc., and the Moscow Ballet. He has designed productions throughout Montana for companies such as Montana Rep Missoula, Bigfork Summer Playhouse, Missoula Children’s Theatre, and Fort Peck Summer Theatre.

To see more images from his design of Chess, visit his website: www.alanmhanson.com.

As the grand prize winner of the competition, Hanson will receive a professional license of Vectorworks Spotlight 2013 with Renderworks software, a personal license of Lightwright 5, a single license of Field Template SoftSymbols V3.5, a copy of Light Plot Deconstructed by Gregg Hillmar, and a copy of Entertainment Design: Scenery, Lighting, and Sound with Vectorworks Spotlight by Kevin Lee Allen.

The Student Lighting Design Competition is sponsored by Nemetschek Vectorworks, City Theatrical, and Field Template. This year, the panel of judges included lighting designer, writer, and editor Justin Lang from iSquint; software engineer and lighting design industry expert Kevin Linzey from Nemetschek Vectorworks; author and lighting designer Steve Shelley of Field Template, developer of Soft Symbols; lighting designer, author and Vectorworks expert Gregg Hillmar; lighting designer and developer of Lightwright John McKernon; and artist, author, and scenic and lighting designer Kevin Lee Allen.

Vectorworks Nomad is now available for Kindle Fire through the Amazon app store.

We are proud to offer Vectorworks Nomad on all major tablet operating systems, as the app is also available for iOS and Android devices. We recently improved the offline and synchronization features for all three platforms, adding tools that allow users to annotate their projects on site, even without a network connection, and sync the updated information when they are online again.

Kindle Fire users can download the app from the Amazon app store here.

Vectorworks Nomad is the mobile application for Vectorworks Cloud Services, which is available exclusively for members of Vectorworks Service Select.

Veteran scenic and lighting designer Gregg Hillmar has succeeded again with Light Plot Deconstructed for Vectorworks Spotlight, Fifth Edition. The guide, written in an easy-to-follow and insightful manner, reflects Hillmar’s drafting style and functions as a companion handbook to the software to help readers draft light plots more easily.

This new edition reflects updates in the 2013 version of Vectorworks Spotlight software, including the re-engineered lighting device object, color options for lighting devices, unlimited fields in Label Legends, the new Clip Cube mode and Auto Hybrid command, improved rendering capabilities, increased navigation speed, and more. Readers will gain a better handle on how to approach design and create more spectacular shows.

Light Plot Deconstructed for Vectorworks Spotlight, Fifth Edition, will be available to ship on May 10. Please visit our Training Guides page for pricing and ordering information.