Georgia Institute of Technology architecture professor Charles Eastman is scheduled to receive the 2016 Society Award of Excellence presented by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) at the University of Michigan Taubman College in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Friday, October 28, 2016.

“This award honors Professor Eastman’s seminal role in founding and leading ACADIA in its earliest years, his pioneering work in the area of Building Information Modeling, Parametric Design, Collaborative Design, Visualization and Fabrication, and many other achievements. His influence in the field of digital design is second to none.” - ACADIA

Eastman is a pioneer of AEC CAD, developing research 3D and early solid and parametric modeling systems for the building industry starting in the middle 1970s. Trained as an architect at Berkeley, he focused on tool development for practitioners with the 'Building Description System' and 'Building Product Modeling', later re-branded as Building Information Modeling. He started the PhD program in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and founded ACADIA. He did a parametric modeling start-up (called FORMTEK) in the early 1980s and then joined University of California, Los Angeles, where he was for eight years before beginning his career at Georgia Tech in 1996 as a professor, and founder of the Digital Building Laboratory.

His research group at Georgia Tech addresses interoperability issues and platform level functionality. This includes precast concrete, steel fabrication, reinforced concrete workflow analyses, implementation of exchange models (Venugopal et al. 2012), and developing integration environments using CIS/2 and IFC.

http://www.arch.gatech.edu/charles-eastman

http://2016.acadia.org/awards.html