The Johnson Estate Sculpture is the outcome of a bequest in the will of the late Ronald Johnson. The will directed that a substantial sum of money should be used to provide a work of sculpture to be placed on the Sydney Harbour foreshore. Following an international competition, the Trustees of the Estate selected Chris Booth, an internationally renowned sculptor from New Zealand, to develop the sculpture. The site chosen for the sculpture is close to Government House in the Royal Botanic Gardens.

We started the project working with Chris Booth’s 1:50 scale maquette in clay. This was the ‘contract document’ that defined the intent of the sculpture. To move the maquette to a digital model a 3D laser scan was made, with the resulting point cloud becoming the geometrical background for further model geometry to be created, which was done in Rhino3D.

The work comprises 2 separate components, the Quartz form and the Sandstone wave form and we used various 3D products to virtually construct and review the entire sculpture through interactive review meetings with all parties involved in the project.

The hollow quartz form is a skin made up of about 16,000 quartz pebbles threaded and woven together with stainless steel cable and wire that is supported by an invisible internal stainless steel structure. A very special Sydney Aboriginal shield design will be the feature of this weaving. It is woven into the quartz form using ochre coloured Nepean River pebbles. The original of this shield is in the Australian Museum and approval for its replication has been given by the Gadigal Aboriginal Community whose ancestors lived in this Sydney region.

The sandstone wave form appears as three undulating strata emerging from the ground. Their undulation and separation is reminiscent of strata that have been subjected to land movement due to tectonic forces. This form was constructed out of about 260 Hawkesbury sandstone blocks quarried from Gosford Quarries. These large blocks – up to 3 metres in length and half a metre thick are bolted together with stainless steel bolts drilled through them in such a way as to be invisible in the finished sculpture. Each block was cut to shape and drilled for the bolts from a detailed drawing generated from the 3D model.

Clash analysis software was used to prove bolting arrangements of the stone blocks was achievable. High dynamic range laser site surveys were used to measure installation tolerances against the digital model and 3D PDF’s were created and used by stone mason’s site team to understand the irregular shapes of the stone blocks and assisted in understanding of the installation sequences and propping locations.

The sculpture was opened on 9th March and has been named Wurrungwuri (‘This side of the Water’)

Arup
Jeff Casson, John Hewitt, Peter Jameson, Alex Edwards, Stuart Bull, Kai Nelson, Rick Benjamin, Chris Mawson & Bruce Moir

Traditional Stone contractors
James Ginter

Gosford Quarries (supplier of sandstone and fabricators)
Garry Boyce, Phil Brown & Greg Cook

I joined the Perth office in January this year from the Cardiff office, via a stint in London, as a GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and 3D Realtime specialist. My background is primarily in GIS, but over the last few years working with the graphics and 3D visualization teams I have become more and more involved in developing realtime environments for 3D models from a range of disciplines across the firm. For me combining the data and information aspects of GIS with high end visualizations is very appealing, and finding innovative ways to present data is something that can set us above the rest.

I have worked on a range of projects, from navigable environments of single rooms to entire cities, creating highway visualizations that allow users to explore planned road schemes and view modeled transport data. Just before I came to Australia I won the Welsh Water Chairman’s Innovation Award for work visualizing the sub-surface sewer systems in Cardiff in an interactive city model. I also presented some of the work at the Quest 3D user conference in Amsterdam.

Realtime 3D environments offer the user the opportunity to navigate themselves through a 3D model, viewing from any perspective and interrogating the model and imported data. Arup have a very strong capability in this field, and are able to very quickly create realtime representations of 3d models as they are being designed. Viewing a design in realtime 3d is a very powerful tool both in the design phase and in the final project stages where visualizations are becoming much sought after.

I import modeled data from a range of sources, including pedestrian, vehicle, blast and fire simulation packages. Subsurface utilities can be shown in their real world locations, and any data with a spatial location can be imported through GIS to create a single source for all 2D and 3D data to be visualized, even if it’s not been done before we can probably import your model and data!

Self contained applications that require no specialist software are compiled and distributed as a standalone file, containing all the models, textures and data required, allowing universal access. We use a variety of realtime engines to suit different purposes and scales of projects. Some examples that I have worked on since coming to Perth earlier this year, and from the UK using the Quest 3D platform, are showcased in the animation above.

I am always on the lookout for ways to push this technology forward, and for more project examples to apply these techniques to so if you have any question, ideas or would like to be involved please don’t hesitate to contact me

I was recently invited to present a short Implementation strategy for using Revit at an AutoDesk Award ceremony for the Building Construction Authority (BCA) here in Singapore. The award was in recognition of the BCA’s continued efforts in promoting the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) within the Singapore construction industry. This is something that has not been as easy as people first thought but the BCA have continued with their efforts and I think are well on the way to breaking new ground with BIM-based Government submissions.

At Arup in Singapore we have been adopting the process of BIM on all our projects for a fair number of years with many number of successes and only a few doubters (still !!). The support we receive at Arup from our leaders locally, regionally and on a global scale makes it a much easier prospect to implement new ideas and technology but what is clear from my time talking about and discussing BIM with others externally that story is not the norm. So when I get asked to do an implementation presentation I usually try to keep it simple and hopefully funny although I think my humour is lost on most and try and address the main things for people to think about, such as software choice versus project type, training, foresight and planning, support, hardware to name a few. However, the one thing I always stress is the need to start; I still fail to really understand why people do not see and take advantage to this approach to design and documentation.

OK so I am sold, in fact I was sold a long time ago but none the less it still seems blazingly obvious why this  PROCESS of leveraging INFORMATION is the way we all need to work together (forget software for now).  The only reason I can come up with otherwise is risk and responsibility and the way the fear of  it is ingrained into the industry and until we alleviate that mentality its gonna be a long old road for all us but as I say in my presentations, we at Arup are well on that road already.

The May/June edition of Architectural Design presents an unusual take on generative architecture based on field theory.  Sean Lally offers a new way of thinking about the design of environments.  Instead of conceptualising indoor environments as a space defined by its surrounding surfaces (e.g. a curtain wall glass facade), Lally conceives of a space as the boundary (isovalue) of a spatial field at a specified value.

For example, we might use particular arrangement of hot and cold panels to generate a radiant field, and if we could visualise the isosurface of a particular temperature then we’d be generating a form within which the environment was controlled without the use of boundary surfaces.
Various articles in this edition of AD explore a fluid dynamics solution as part of the generative process.

It’s an idea that we’ve been playing around with for a while too and this seemed like a nice opportunity to see what could be created.  I’ve used a computational fluid dynamics package (ANSYS-CFX) to set up convection currents within a box shaped volume and visualised the isosurface of a constant temperature.  This has then been exported, translated and rendered using the Radiance visualisation package to produce the image above, with a rather unlikely sky.  It’s an interesting problem to contemplate how the people within the space would modify this environmental boundary, i.e. there is an interdependency at work here …

We have been developing MassMotion, a unique 3-D simulation software application that can be used to predict human behaviour within virtual built environments. The people, or agents, in MassMotion models are intelligent and can retain information about their virtual environment. The agents are able to recognise congestion and to consider alternate routes based on their familiarity with an environment. The inclusion of the kinds of emergent phenomena that occur every day in the real world – such as lighting – allows us to analyse crowd behaviour in all kinds of buildings, transit areas and public spaces and landscapes.

The really nice feature the 3-D environment in MassMotion offers is the ability to import design geometry so with very-early-stage schematic models, designers can watch and observe how a space might perform and then make changes to the proposed space before running it again.

MassMotion was originally developed for transport planning by a team in Arup’s Toronto office, and has now been adopted by Arup’s pedestrian planning team in Australia. During 2008, Arup funded a project called Extending MassMotion to investigate how other engineering, planning and design disciplines could add information to models about phenomena that influence human movement. During this period, we spoke with clients and academics to further develop the research and business applications of MassMotion, and developed ways to better communicate the work – for example, using software engines and peripheral devices such as Nintendo Wii controllers to navigate the environment.

One of the outcomes was to introduce influence maps, as above. These can be used where there is not hard items defining a path like furniture or walls, but transient elements such as smoke.

If you’d like something to print, click the image above for a pdf on MassMotion.

July 2011 Update

MassMotion has developed. It has been taken on by Arup’s software house Oasys and has now been released as a commercial product.