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Bentley Announces Trial Program for Generative Design

EXTON, PA, Nov 5, 2007 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated today announced its trial program for generative design in architecture and engineering. The program, which opens Nov. 16, 2007, will include a no-charge 90-day subscription to GenerativeComponents – Bentley’s generative design software – and a Web 2.0 community “space” for users to accelerate their learning and to share ideas about this new approach to design.

In generative design, architects and engineers describe design components and relationships using elegant, powerful algorithms. As the design progresses, a change to one component in the system automatically drives changes to other related components – updating the design. Using this approach on even the most complex designs, users can quickly explore a broad range of alternatives, speed their design iterations, and generate designs that are freer in form, more efficient, and more fit for purpose.

“In generative design, architects and engineers are achieving results and designs that were virtually unthinkable before,” said Buddy Cleveland, senior vice president, Bentley Applied Research. “They’ve upgraded from using computers to simply speed the drawing process to employing immense computational power to discover their ideal design.”

GenerativeComponents uniquely preserves and exploits the critical relationships between design intent and geometry. Users can, for instance, dynamically model and manipulate geometry, apply rules and capture relationships among geometric features, and define complex forms through concisely expressed algorithms. By virtue of GenerativeComponents’ extension of Bentley’s MicroStation environment, the resulting generative designs can flow through to detailed production and fabrication without information loss.

“Emerging from work with the forward-thinking SmartGeometry Group, Bentley’s generative design software was inspired by creative designers who were not content with the constraints imposed by the traditional CAD interface,” said Makai Smith, GenerativeComponents product manager. “GenerativeComponents applied to their real-world projects was so compelling that we have decided to open this trial program to accelerate the learning curve for those architects and engineers so eager to raise the level of innovation in their work.”

The generative design virtual community site will be located at www.be.org/gd. It will deliver a robust set of GenerativeComponents-related resources from Bentley – including the software for download and on-demand learning – as well as an emerging community of blogs, wikis, forums, and a media center for sharing generative design project work. Practitioners will be able to meet equally inquisitive and industrious peers, share how-to’s and best practices, and learn about upcoming events such as SmartGeometry 2008.

GenerativeComponents has already been adopted by top architectural and engineering colleges and universities around the world, including Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT in North America; the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, the University of Bath, and the Architectural Association in the United Kingdom; TU Delft and KTH Stockholm in Continental Europe; and RMIT University in Australia.

Designs that have been completed using GenerativeComponents include Dostyk Towers by NBBJ and E/Ye Design, Cutty Sark Pavilion by YOUMEHESHE, The Pinnacle by Kohn Pederson Fox, and Museo del Acero by Grimshaw Architects.

What Experts Are Saying

“KPF has been using GenerativeComponents for some time and it forms a key component in the armory of the KPF Computational Geometry Group. Several of our most advanced projects employ GenerativeComponents as a tool for exploring thousands of options as well as the complex geometry to be used in final construction, all ultimately benefiting our clients. The nature of GenerativeComponents as a MicroStation extension means that, as a matter of course, our advanced designs can be interchanged with an extraordinary variety of software.” – Lars Hesselgren, Kohn Pederson Fox

“At Arup, we believe firmly in the principle of integrated design and integrated approaches to design – it’s the only way to design complex buildings well. That’s why we use GenerativeComponents. And we are not alone. We are starting to see young people coming through the system doing things we could only have dreamed about a few years ago.” – J Parrish, Arup Sport

“Simplicity seeds complexity. But in the search for form we need to add reference to the representation to articulate the result. GenerativeComponents enables us to find, explore, and regulate forms more rapidly, and to transmit these forms to fabrication more economically.” – Hugh Whitehead, Foster + Partners

“Grimshaw’s offices all share a common DNA. We are a design-driven office, and all projects are informed by the specific location, program, and environmental forces. We employ GenerativeComponents to take in and embed the multitude of inputs and structure them using this common DNA, thus enabling us to rapidly explore a variety of environmentally appropriate solutions for each design project.” – Shane Burger, Grimshaw Architects

“Using GenerativeComponents, we can accelerate our iteration through design options and, in parallel, assess all concepts and dismiss those that would be uneconomic to construct. As a result, we get to spend more time fine-tuning the best solution.” – Volker Mueller, NBBJ

“Using GenerativeComponents to design the Cutty Sark Pavilion we were able to dynamically and fluidly alter our building design footprint to responsively accommodate an ever-changing plot plan while maintaining the most economic balance of material and structure. In fact, we only considered the design to be fixed when the construction was finished.” – Simon Beames, YOUMEHESHE

“Projects already completed using GenerativeComponents clearly illustrate tremendous creativity based on a highly developed sense of intuitive design, while being expressed with a clarity that comes from an equally developed sense of design logic.” – David Chadwick, CADUser

More on the Development of GenerativeComponents

GenerativeComponents was born of a research project led by Bentley Building’s director of research, Robert Aish, Ph.D., that attracted expert input from a network of elite adopters. Said Dr. Aish, “With Bentley’s GenerativeComponents, designers and engineers have a unique opportunity to shape the built environment by challenging conventional assumptions about the form, fabrication, and behavior of buildings.

“One aspect of this is the use of computational design tools that are not simply encoding current design practice. Rather, generative approaches pose creative and intellectual challenges in key areas of contemporary design: geometry, composition, and algorithms.”

As the software solidified, the research transitioned to commercial product development led by Bentley Software. The Bentley developers continued to collaborate with the network of early adopters, who coalesced into the independent SmartGeometry Group.

“It’s impossible to talk about the early development work on GenerativeComponents without first recognizing the tireless enthusiasm and visionary aspirations of Robert Aish,” said CEO Greg Bentley. “As he’s leaving Bentley Systems at this juncture, I want to personally thank Robert for helping me see the tremendous potential of generative design. We wish him well in his next research pursuits.”

Mr. Bentley continued, “But credit for this innovation must be shared with the SmartGeometry Group, whose members exemplify the world’s most forward-thinking designers. I thank the group for its diligent work with the Bentley team on this important development. Together, we intend to make GenerativeComponents part of the vocabulary of infrastructure professionals everywhere who want to move beyond CAD to discover their ideal design.”

The GenerativeComponents software for download and the generative design community site will be available to individual users at www.be.org/gd. After the trial period, practitioners will be able to upgrade to a one-year Discovery Subscription to GenerativeComponents for US$250. MicroStation SELECT subscribers can immediately download GenerativeComponents from SELECT Services Online. For more information about GenerativeComponents, visit www.bentley.com/gc.

About the SmartGeometry Group

The SmartGeometry Group is firmly committed to the belief that computer-aided design lends itself to capturing the geometric relationships that form the foundation of architecture. The group is dedicated to educating the construction professions in the new skills required to effectively use advanced design systems such as GenerativeComponents. The directors of the SmartGeometry Group include Lars Hesselgren of Kohn Pederson Fox, Hugh Whitehead of Foster + Partners, and J Parrish of Arup Sport. For more information, go to www.smartgeometry.org.

About Bentley

Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2400 colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major owner-operators, and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.

For more information visit at http://www.bentley.com.  

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