False Color @ UMass

As anyone who follows our UMass social media feeds (@UMassBCT on Twitter and Facebook) knows, this fall we (the BCT program at UMass) organized an exhibit of some of our work under the title of “False Color”. This exhibit was up in the UMass Design Building since October 8 and will be taken down tomorrow, […] Read more..

How much abuse can Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) take?

Being about a month away from moving my office into a Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) building, I am of course interested in answers to this question. As it turns out, many recent research projects proved that CLT can evidently handle quite a bit of abuse (beyond regular day-to-day loading and use)! I may be biased, but […] Read more..

Second edition of “Architectural Design with SketchUp” is now available!

I am very excited to be announcing the release of the second edition of my book “Architectural Design with SketchUp” today! For this edition, I went back through the text and updated and improved a lot of content. As before, my main goal was to keep it relevant for as large a variety of SketchUp users as possible and […] Read more..

My SketchUp Book is Out!

This is an exciting week! My book “Architectural Design with SketchUp” is now available from all of the online booksellers and should be in stores soon, too. After a year of writing and a few months editing and finalizing, it feels really good to see the final product now on store shelves and on Amazon’s […] Read more..

Analyze this! Creating geometry for structural analysis in SketchUp

I just posted a tutorial on my new SketchUp book’s companion site, http://sketchupfordesign.com, about how you can use SketchUp to create geometry for structural analysis. You can find the article (and the video) here: http://sketchupfordesign.com/tutorials/analyze-this-creating-geometry-for-structural-analysis-in-sketchup/

A hot house

A hot house

With the record-breaking heat wave we’re experiencing on the East Coast, it was interesting to look at the exterior of our house with an infrared thermometer. The image above lists the results (in Celsius because I prefer metric when it comes to temperatures). As you can see, this illustrates nicely the benefits of white surfaces […] Read more..