Mastering Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2013

Foreword

As I write these notes, we are fast approaching the 10th anniversary of Autodesk's acquisition of Revit Technologies in April 2002. One of my earliest presentations after joining Autodesk in 2000 posited that the building industry takes approximately 10 years to understand and absorb any innovation, and the uptake of Revit, and with it the concept of building information modeling (BIM), in some ways is proof of that concept, but in other more important ways, perhaps I missed the real point. When we decided to make that acquisition more than a decade ago, we were convinced that the building industry was poised to make an important transition in the means of representation — a shift from exclusively drafting-based paradigms to something much more efficient. But who could have anticipated the sorts of changes, and the emerging potential transformations, that Revit has driven the BIM revolution?

Of course, everyone knew that parametric modeling could be the basis of better technical drawings of all sorts and that poorly coordinated documents were the plague of the industry. But Revit's early competitors touted those capabilities. What was really interesting about 2002 and the decade to follow was the convergence of a number of ideas: realization that productivity in the industry was stunted, that sustainable design was no longer optional, that new business structures could create systemic change, and that ever-more-powerful computers brought the reality of modeling to the ...