Claire Botkin's Contact Details

Claire Botkin's Company Details

Alberta Data Systems

Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 1 Employees
Information Technology & Services

The field tested AutoCladding method is grounded in an innovative new software process for reducing total time and financial costs in designing, manufacturing, installing and managing a building envelope structure, the most expensive and complex aspect of a building design. Tight financial margins in the bidding process for building envelopes and the rather high levels of inefficiency and waste in their manufacture and assembly make current practise needlessly expensive. Fear of the potentially devastating effects of failure compels the industry to be inherently conservative, so new technologies are viewed with suspicion. To address these problems, the AutoCladding process makes use of building envelope digital prototyping in the creation and capture of data needed by the various contributors to the building envelope life cycle. This includes design data, manufacturing data and general BIM data archived for future reference. Prototyping is used in the wider manufacturing culture to reduce implementation risks and costs by up to 50%. If a building envelope is viewed as a mechanism, a digitally prototyped building envelope, particularly for generating manufacturing data, can produce significant benefits. To be effective at each phase in the building envelope creation process, digital prototypes must be simple, inexpensive and rapid to create, be useable in a cycle of layers of ever increasing detail, and must ultimately provide the specific data needed to manufacture, manage and mount the final component set. The first field trials of the AutoCladding method in constructing extremely complex architectural panel systems used in the indoor climbing industry have validated the underlying principles of this technology. Current development will see the AutoCladding method expand into general building envelope implementation, including the complex framing systems used in glazed infill curtain walls.