Al leads computational development for Buro Happold globally, directing our distributed development community across all of our offices.
With a focus on code, as part of our computational engineering leadership team, Al helps ensure our visual programming, scripting and coding practices are embedded into all of our engineering teams as a non-specialist skill.
Al joined Buro Happold in 2007 following his masters and PhD in Civil and Architectural Engineering. Since joining the firm he has led computational work on some of Buro Happold’s most iconic projects such as, Louvre Abu Dhabi and the London Olympic Stadium Transformation – projects that have demanded novel approaches to computation, optimisation and scripting to make them possible.
Buro Happold’s clear focus is around increasing participation and accessibility to new technology and computational approaches, through a culture of open sharing, dissemination and upskilling of abilities.
Much of the work of Al and his team over recent years has focused on creating a globally accessible coding framework for mass participation in engineering tool development. This foundational work is enabling innovation across all of our multidisciplinary teams in performance driven design – tapping into Buro Happold’s collective expertise.
Despite the progress made in design computation with BIM and generative components, our industry continues to grapple with fragmented workflows and proprietary data formats.
Al Fisher will provide an update on BHoM (Building and Habitats object Model), the open-source framework used by Buro Happold to support its firm-wide design computation and digital collaboration. He will present the BHoM’s unique federated object model, its emphasis on composability, extensibility, and “no black boxes” transparency, and how it is used at scale in a large engineering practice.
Robert Aish will present the progress made in the field of Design Computation and a new generation of Design Languages: the successors to Design Script and Generative Components. He will position the BHoM frameworks within that journey, and how they enable more abstract design representations, which in turn allow the creation of derivative design representations that can be more coordinated, collaborative, and composable.
As a wrap-up, Alain Waha will summarise the BHoM framework’s potential to unlock advanced AI-driven design processes and address critical industry challenges, from achieving Net Zero to industrialising construction.