HygroScope – Climate-responsive artwork in wood

(Image: achimmenges.net) This art piece illustrates nicely one of wood’s most interesting properties – its hygroscopicity. Wood attracts water from the surrounding atmosphere and binds it in its cell walls. What the artists did here was laminate an uneven number of veneers (usually a no-no in plywood production), which results in a plywood that curls […] Read more..

More from Google: 3D Warehouse changes

On the heels of the announcement that SketchUp has been sold to Trimble comes another announcement from Google, this time related to Google Earth. As described in various press releases and posts, Google will – among other changes – implement automated building (and vegetation!) generation from flyover data for major cities. The following video explains this: […] Read more..

Update now to SketchUp 8 Maintenance Release 3

The SketchUp folks yesterday released a maintenance update for SketchUp: Official Google SketchUp Blog: Announcing SketchUp 8 M3. Get it now to keep your favorite 3D modeling software running smoothly. A list of updates  is here: The following issues have been fixed SketchUp can crash when using Ruby plugins that call Ruby observers. In this release […] Read more..

“Favorite Places” presented at NEARC Spring Conference 2012

Together with a colleague of mine (Sasha Stepanov from Campus Planning), I just presented the “My Favorite Places” website (and the UMass “Likes/Dislikes” site) at the 2012 Spring Conference of NEARC, an ArcGIS user group here in the Northeast. All in all, this was a great event (held at beautiful Smith College) that allowed me […] Read more..

Interview with Hermann Kaufmann on Architecture in the Bregenzerwald / Vorarlberg, Austria

The following video interview with renowned Austrian architect Hermann Kaufmann illustrates nicely how traditional wood architecture can be honored in a modern context. Architecture in Bregenzerwald / Vorarlberg – YouTube:

Google SketchUp sold to Trimble

As announced today, Google has sold their widely popular 3D modeling application, SketchUp, to Trimble, a company that focuses on GPS- and heavy-construction hardware and software (for example, the steel and concrete BIM software Tekla belongs to Trimble). This is a very interesting and at least on the surface quite appropriate move. After all, SketchUp […] Read more..