Wood Design Photo Series: Austria Passive House Whistler

On a recent visit to Whistler, BC (yep, the place where the 2010 Winter Olympics were held), I had the fortune to be given an impromptu tour of the Austria Passive House, a building constructed for the Olympics and used as “home base” for Austrian media during the events. This 2700 s.f., two-story building is […] Read more..

Go to Europe for wood

Image: Forum Holzbau While we are (slowly) preparing for our trip to the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Italy this summer, I realized that I never posted about the two upcoming wood-building -related conferences in Europe. If you have some spare travel money (yep, flights are not cheap this summer) and some time in […] Read more..

Wood Design & Building Magazine Online

I must somehow have overlooked this one. Apparently since last fall, Canadian Wood Council’s Wood Design & Building magazine has been posting their issues online using a free web-based viewer. If you don’t know this magazine yet – it is a beautifully presented resource for North American wood design and architecture that gets published approximately four […] Read more..

Wood Design Award 2008-09 book is available

Just after I posted about the current wood awards, the Canadian Wood Council came out with a book showcasing winners from the 2008-09 season. These books are always a beautiful reference and source for many inspirations. If you want to get one, follow this link. I have also been told that students get a 40% […] Read more..

Awards, awards! The 2009 Wood Awards season is here

Awarded Admittedly, award ceremonies come around at all times during the year, but two of the recent and notable awards for wood building and architecture were the UK Wood Design Awards (October 2009) and the Ontario Wood Awards (November 2009, also written up here). Of all the amazing buildings (and furniture) that have received an […] Read more..

Hot 3D (SketchUp) models

Oh, dear – maybe the title goes a bit too far. It’s not about what you may think this is about… This really is about combining temperature and virtual 3D models of buildings. Click on the image below to get an idea of what I mean. For this project I took a lot of thermography […] Read more..

SketchUp to Revit to Solar Study

Expanding on yesterday’s post, I wanted to try out how I could take a building shell model that I originally created in SketchUp, take it into Revit 2010 and run a solar analysis on it using Autodesk’s new Solar Radiation Technology Preview for Revit Architecture and Revit MEP (download it from Autodesk Labs). And guess […] Read more..