Part 2: Radical Common Sense Here at ncx+ we are enjoying along with our much-appreciated industry partners a post-BIM journey towards Making Buildings not through an archaic transactional (200-year-old) model of Design & Construction but via a completely fresher relational paradigm, a collegium of sorts. Making Buildings is not about incremental innovations to already exhausted procurement models. This would include the current “soup de jour” Incentivized Project Delivery (IPD) hailed as a panacea for all our design and construction woes. Rather Making Buildings is simply a 100% radically innovative and fundamentally common-sense approach without the waste and...
The End of Design + Construction and the Emergence of Making Buildings
Part 1: A Moonshot and the Master Builder John F. Kennedy posed a literal moonshot in May 1961 saying that the USA “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the “Earth.” In mid-July 1969, the USA exceeded that...
Imagine there’s no box to begin with. Take everything you’ve learned about the business of architecture and “what can’t be done” and throw that out the window. We are looking for two above-average, tech-savvy technologists to join us in our journey to elevate the industry. To be better we realized that we have to create...
NextShift – Construction is not Planes, Trains or Automobiles
Scott Berkun said[1] that true innovators get their biggest ideas from two sources – brainstorming and looking elsewhere. Our approach to implementing and testing ideas at ncx+ is always based on being generally right so we can move ahead rather than prescriptively correct and go nowhere; the former results in observing failure as a gateway...
NextShift – Taking Stock of the Gender/Harassment Double Jeopardy
Firstly, it should not take sexual assault + harassment allegations so close to home in Alberta in order to have to write this blog. The theme for our next blog was going to be on diversity and homogeneity in the workplace, but we need to say more particularly as gender inequality is the fertile ground...
The beginning of October marks the 1st anniversary of Next Architecture in its current iteration – a remarkable, challenging and emotional year. Last year I remarked that I hoped that in 12 months we could say that we never expected Next to be what it is today. I am happy to say that this is...
Early buy-in to the data-led process by the client (Alberta Infrastructure) gave us a great jumping-off point to start the Edmonton Law Court glazing replacement. A point cloud for early data collection gave the team confidence to proceed with modeling and reduced the dimensional risk. Not only did it allow a fairly accurate design model...
Renowned and trusted employment experts Bachman Turner Overdrive summarized what employment means for many in our industry – “takin’ care of business—every day—and working overtime.” The Government of Alberta has just released changes in the employment legislation related to overtime hours and pay stating that non-eligible employees include “…professionals, including…architects”. Given the current economic climate,...
