Category: Features
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From Duct Taping to Reinventing Construction – an Interview with Steve Holzer
Construction tech is hot. The question is: Are the dollars are invested in contech reinventing the industry or are they merely adding patches to outdated processes? Steve Holzer, an industry expert and Product Evangelist at BIMobject, shares his views in this interview. Steve Holzer’s LinkedIn profile details industry experience that starts from 1976 when he…
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Know What You’ve Built: An Interview with Timo Makkonen of Congrid
Construction contains thousands of big and small tasks. How can a client and contractor know if they have all been completed as intended? Congrid offers an answer to that question. Congrid is a Finnish construction software developer. The company provides software for punch lists, quality and safety audits, and design document distribution. It operates in…
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Power to the Office Worker
Modern offices consist of variable spaces that cater to personal preferences and functional needs. The indoor air quality is typically not as adaptive to various tasks, which can lead to suboptimal worker performance and dissatisfaction. A pilot project led by Senate Properties used BIM and building data to develop an operational model that helps workers…
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The Future of High-Rise is Localized and Responsive
By 2050, 70 percent of world’s population of almost 10 billion people will live in urban areas. The presenters at the High Rise – Northern Exposure seminar envisioned how high-rise construction will meet the requirements of urbanization, and what technologies have to offer to builders and users today. Lintula and Smithson A line-up of high-rise…
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Giving Heating Control to Residents is Good for the Environment
Heating in EU households accounts for 79% of the total energy consumption. In cold climate areas, like Finland, the percentage is even higher. Enermix set out to test how room-level control in district-heated apartment houses would affect the comfort of living and energy consumption. Janne Heinonen, Enermix “Our mission is to digitalize Finnish buildings, especially…
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KIRA-digi Experiments Paving Way for Built Environment Digitalization
KIRA-digi was a national built environment digitalization spearhead project of the Finnish government carried out in 2016-2019. The project supported 138 experiments with €4.7 million in funding from the government. Participating companies invested 7.8 million in total. Here are some of the experiments that we’ve featured on AEC-Business.com. Duuers: Better Proposals with Less Work Small…
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Helsinki Stream City: A Re-imagining Outside the System
Modern man lives under the illusion of being the most intelligent being out there. This is the paradox of human nature; we all want to make the best decisions with the knowledge we have at any given time, but on the other hand, our thinking is largely based on how our ancestors organized the world…
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The Urban Village Project – An Interview with Jamiee Williams
In the podcast interview with Jamiee Williams, Architectural Lead at SPACE10, we discuss the recently announced Urban Village Project. The project rethinks how we design, build, finance and share our future homes, neighborhoods, and cities. SPACE10 is IKEA’s global research and design lab. SPACE10 is on a mission to respond to the major societal changes…
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Know What’s Under Ground and Make Smarter Planning Decisions
A Finnish experimentation project developed a framework for classifying ground conditions for building and infrastructure construction. It will help anticipate the future cost of foundation laying during the early stages of city planning. The ground conditions of an area can have a substantial effect on the costs and the environmental impacts of constructing buildings and…
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Taking Service Network Planning to the Next Level
Cities and municipalities are basically systems for delivering services for the benefit of their citizens. An experimental project demonstrated how improving the flow of data between these services could save a lot of time and taxpayer money. Emilia Rönkkö Emilia Rönkkö is an architect who worked for the Finnish city of Kuopio. Besides that, she…