Saturday, June 25, 2011

Who owns the column?

C16 is not a column yet, a figment of imagination and a square on a paper.
A square or a rectangle, depending if you are looking at the soft-copy-representation (of the hard-copy-print) of the architect’s or structural engineer’s imagination.
The architects visualises C16 as a tall and skinny piece, with a rectangular footprint of 400x1000. For the structural engineer, C16 needs to be square. They may have reached a compromise by now, that had not get onto the drawings yet.
Petty these drawings have been issued as IFC.

I look at C16 and think ‘clash detection.’ How would you automatically clash detect this?
If you worked from drawings only, and were charged with integrating all disciplines would you model the columns twice and run two models through the clash detection machine?
What setting would you put in? ‘Highlight where columns are not matching?’ But, surely that could not be called a ‘clash’?
That would be a non-match detection!

If there was a model earlier in the piece this would not have been an issue. Correct?
Who is responsible for sizing the column? The structural engineer’s you’d say.
So, it needs to be square.
But, the architect normally sets them out. He wants this one to be a rectangle!

I’ve seen numerous flowcharts describing how these things should work...
still not quite sure who owns C16?



1 comment: