PAYETTE’s Hackers Win a Top Prize in the AEC Hackathon

Recently, PAYETTE’s own Santiago Garay and Chris Mackey set out for the annual AEC Hackathon in New York City – a regular stop for many of the world’s greatest Grasshopper gurus, Dynamo computational designers, architectural web application developers and much more.

This year, Chris Mackey helped teach a workshop with Mostapha Roudsari, the founder of the Ladybug plugin for environmental design that Chris helps develop and regularly applies here at PAYETTE. The workshop was also taught by Sarith Subramaniam (PhD), who recently added advanced daylight simulation capabilities to the plugin. Together, the trio showcased the new daylight capabilities along with a recently-added connection to a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) engine OpenFOAM.

As Chris was teaching this workshop, Santiago attended another session on parametric façade design in which had the chance to show his SkinDesigner Grasshopper plugin to some of the attendees. Santiago has been working on the SkinDesigner plugin in-house over the past year and has applied it to a number of projects, most notably the Fifth XiangYa Hospital patient tower façade. SkinDesigner’s capabilities were well received among the workshop leaders and many of the experts expressed that the tool would bring a lot of value to the design practice when it is released.

The crowning event for the Hackathon is a final session where hackers with diverse skillsets across multiple offices make teams to realize a new software idea in the course of 24-hours. Working together with Elcin Ertugrul (CORE studio at Thornton Tomasetti), Margaret Wang (CORE studio at Thornton Tomasetti), Andrew Salveson (Perkins+Will), Saeran Vasanthakumar (Perkins+Will) and Brian Monwai (The Beck Group), the PAYETTE hackers took one of the top prizes in the event for a web interface to visualize the recently-collected energy use of Boston Buildings, titled BEnMap.

Chris Mackey presenting the BEnMap web interface in the Hackathon’s final review.

Feel free to post any comments and suggestions to the github.

Happy Hacking!