Started working w/ MicroStation in '93 on Intergraph VAX-based mini-computers. Yes, Le Orginale was being taught as an elective in 1st year at the National University of Singapore's School of Architecture. Yep, that country. There were digitizer boards, rows of Intergraph "Clippers" - in short, the 'whole nine yards'. No idea what version it was, but it had materials and sun lighting / shadow casting. Thought it was the absolute bees knees, thirty-some-odd years later, I still do.
in less than a year, I transferred to Pratt Institute, New York where freshman were making paper in their first semester. Very conceptual school, design studio projects were based on anything from a Kafka novel, to the process of nourishment - food from the the ground, into the animal, all the way the plate at the dinner table.
I was Pratt's first digital architectural student. What really captivated me was the software's ability to model sunlight shadows, the solar envelopes, of any site, given location on the planet via latitude/longitude coordinates, orientation, and date + time. In order to take it where i wanted, into my design studio, I needed a handle on the veracity of these capabilities. So I modeled the side fire escape on the tenement building in which I 'roomed' with a fellow student - the adjacent building was two stories lower, and with our apartment level with the adjacent roof, it was a no brainer. I rendered the solar shadow of the fire escape against the wall to which it was bolted, at a 10am and 2pm two days ahead, printed them out, climbed out the window, and lo and behold, both were as near identical to what I saw in reality. In as much as a sophomore's architectural vision could discern. From that point on, almost all my design studio projects were based from solar envelopes, their volumes, defined by the shape of the surrounding urban context - archi-geek for the buildings adjacent to our project site.
The faculty had no real idea of how to evaluate me as an architectural student - instead of painstaking drawings, concept sketches, rough to final models, I placed my critic panel in a dark room, ran through a series of renderings, then animations. I used both the typical walk-through as well as solar shadow animations on both solstices and the equinox. Then I asked if there was any space, or element of my project they had question about, and would like to visit - as I would proceeed to walk them there, live. A steady mouse hand after three sleepless nights was a challenge,
I then became pigeonholed, not only as the digital student, but also the sun shadow / solar envelope dude - joined a post-graduate research group on Machu Picchu, Peru, in my junior year, and modeled not only Machu Picchu, but the Andes Ranges - we're talking about 8,000 feet altitude change from the Andes River to Machu Picchu, and another 2,300 feet to the neighboring peak Huayna Picchu. After a few published papers, the research group secured a grant from the Peabody Foundation, to assist in producing a permanent exhibit in Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History - simply because by that point, while "the recognized experts on Machu Picchu" was to pompous for my tastes, we simply had the most complete data on it. Understand that the sun's positions changes incrementally over the centuries, and in the 11th Century, the sun's precise location when it broke the horizon on the Inca's sacred Winter Solstice is not in same as today. That was the real thrust of the first paper we published. To conduct a multi-year long study to find out why that sacred shadow of the cat in the sun temple could no longer be seen.
Then I joined the real world, and have been practicing architecture for 25+ years, with built work in Singapore, London, Miami, Orlando & New York. Most were published in some fashion, but the Miami hotel won the 2009 Miami AIA Chapter's Honor Award (Unbuilt), and completed won the National AIA Honor Award. I now find myslef back in school, trying to finish some classes that "fell off the truck" when I got made a research fellow (how else was Pratt to get their hands on the grant - the digital models were all mine). They threw me into some post-graduate courses, made me a teacher's assistant in design studio, and my career pretty much grew from there.
Apologies - I fully admit my challenges with brevity.
Simply put, I used Microstation so thoroughly in an academic environment, I was offered a position at Bentley around about the same time as the grant. I was a team member in many competitions for the 9/11 memorials including Daniel Libeskind's winning entry to World Trade Center Masterplan. However, as we all know, the only time Microstation is used is in a transportation project necessitating government oversight. Like New York City's MTA, or Port Authority. Otherwise, Revit is th4e software de jour.
I'm ecstatic that my reinstated student status at Pratt Institute's School of Architecture, as I'm trying to finish that pesky sophomore World History requirement, as I now have the software again on my computer, and all that work, only viewable in rendered images, animations etc, is now back live.
I'm very much looking forward to joining a community Microstation users in the professional arenas, in addition to academia - I now want to know how it matches up to Revit in the BIM world that the AEC professions live in.
I will be pestering people a lot, and hopefully, be able to contribute in a meaningful and progressive fashion. I'm assuming Triforma has also advanced, along with visualization, I also understand we can now interface with Google Earth like Trimble's Sketchup can. All these and more, I am, and will, be doing deep dives into.
AMAZED TO BE BACK, QUIVERING WITH ANTICIPATION!
TS Yong
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