Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If you've ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are you've experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with our software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything, but some segments of the general public are not yet aware of that.
The Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco celebrates design — the process of taking a great idea and turning it into a reality. With about 60 different exhibits regularly on display that showcase the innovative work of Autodesk customers, the gallery illustrates the role technology plays in great design and engineering. Autodesk Gallery Ambassadors conduct gallery tours as a sideline to their day jobs. The tours provide ambassadors with opportunities to practice public speaking in front of small groups. Autodesk Gallery Curator, Jason Medal-Katz, chose the title, ambassador, instead of docent because the correct way to address an ambassador is "your Excellency." Alas, this never happens.
The Art imitates life exhibit is an exhibit that you see on the 2nd floor of our One Market office in San Francisco as part of our Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) collection:
People
Software
- Autodesk AutoCAD // more
- Autodesk Maya // more
- CEAP/D3PLOT (Arup)
- LS-DYNA FEM
- MATLAB
- NEAS Acoustics
- Rhinoceros
IMAGINE
One of the world's most innovative and influential architects, 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Toyo Ito, has been making us reconsider the role of buildings in our lives for decades. With his unique brand of conceptual architecture, he seeks to reflect the complexity of contemporary life, where simple cubes are incapable of containing the diversity of modern society.
World-renowned architect, Toyo Ito, designed the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House as a sound cave featuring huge cavernous spaces consisting of curved walls without any supporting columns.
His latest statement is the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House. Combining philosophy with design, Ito's project is a three-theater, 2,000-plus-seat performing arts center that contains, in addition to theater spaces — workshops, restaurants, cafés, and a roof garden. The opera house was designed as a massive sound cave, meant to echo the process of past societies creating settlements in caves, adding necessary functions as the communities grew. To characterize the space as an amalgamation of diverse activities rather than a more traditional theater complex, Ito organically integrated the areas of the opera house. For example, inside the theaters, audience and performer spaces are also blended, providing viewers with a sense of sharing time with those on stage as a group while giving performers the feeling of being enveloped by the audience. Ito's vision of a fluid, partially open, complex form where visitors meander through intentionally labyrinthine, cave-like arches is meant to mirror a forever-changing, always-evolving living city, so much so that Ito will never consider the building to be truly finished, even upon completion of construction.
DESIGN
The project uses highly advanced technology and structures to create a loose framework that provides a flexible and adaptable space from which inspiration can be drawn by those who use it — or those, like us, who simply marvel at it.
To achieve his complex vision, nothing short of a new system for building had to be created — The Emerging Grid — a method by which rigid, inorganic spaces become soft, organic ones. As designing by hand was impossible, an entirely new optimization algorithm for structures had to be created.
AutoCAD and Maya were used with The Emerging Grid — an optimization algorithm that converted rigid, inorganic spaces to soft, organic shapes — resulting in curved walls created using sprayed concrete and inlaid floors.
MAKE
Although Ito was excited by the fact that through technology, architectural form can now reflect the complex balance that can be seen in the fluidity of a dynamic moving body or in a growing plant, that doesn't mean that it's easy to build.
Formed of 50 curved walls connected with inlaid floors and a core service wall, the main structure's complex organic shapes could only be reinforced with sprayable concrete normally used for building tunnels.
Computer technology is indeed beginning to free architecture from the bounds of Euclidean geometry.
Thanks to the Autodesk Gallery team for the descriptive text for this blog post.
Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental).
The Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco is open to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. There is a guided tour on Wednesdays at 12:30 pm and a self-guided audio tour available anytime. Admission is free. Visit us.
Geometry is alive in the lab
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