If you’re the type to follow the latest devel­op­ments in archi­tec­tural soft­ware (read: CAD Geek), then you’ll be excited about this announce­ment. Bent­ley Sys­tems has released it’s industry-​leading soft­ware, Gen­er­a­tive Com­po­nents, as a free trial until May 2008. The soft­ware has been making waves, espe­cially in London, over the past few years. I was espe­cially taken by the Gen­er­a­tive Com­po­nents plug-​in when I heard Robert Aish speak (direc­tor of researcher at Bent­ley Sys­tems) at the Game, Set and Match con­fer­ence at the NAi in Rot­ter­dam, 2006.

The soft­ware is fea­tured through the Smart Geom­e­try con­fer­ence series. Pre­sen­ta­tions from the winter 2007 Smart Geom­e­try con­fer­ence in New York City is avail­able online, and the list of pre­sen­ters is impres­sive. The 2008 Smart Geom­e­try con­fer­ence is hap­pen­ing as I write in Munich, DE. We will be quite for­tu­nate if the pre­sen­ta­tions are made avail­able after the conference.

What Bent­ley Sys­tems has to say about their Gen­er­a­tive Components:

Gen­er­a­tive­Com­po­nents™ (GC) enables archi­tects and engi­neers to pursue designs and achieve results that were vir­tu­ally unthink­able before. Empow­ered by com­pu­ta­tional meth­ods, the design­ers can direct their cre­ativ­ity to deliver inspired sus­tain­able build­ings that are freer in form and use inno­v­a­tive mate­ri­als and assem­blies. GC facil­i­tates this by allow­ing the quick explo­ration of a broad range of “what-if” alter­na­tives for even the most com­plex buildings.

This unique gen­er­a­tive design soft­ware cap­tures and exploits the crit­i­cal rela­tion­ships between design intent and geom­e­try. Designs can be refined by either dynam­i­cally mod­el­ing and directly manip­u­lat­ing geom­e­try, by apply­ing rules and cap­tur­ing rela­tion­ships among build­ing ele­ments, or by defin­ing com­plex build­ing forms and sys­tems through con­cisely expressed algorithms.

To inform deci­sions, GC is inte­grated with build­ing infor­ma­tion mod­el­ing, analy­sis, and sim­u­la­tion soft­ware, pro­vid­ing feed­back on build­ing mate­ri­als, assem­blies, sys­tems per­for­mance, and envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions. This inte­gra­tion also ensures that intent becomes real­ity by enabling designs to accu­rately and effi­ciently flow through to detailed pro­duc­tion and fabrication.

Gen­er­a­tive­Com­po­nents is already enabling lead­ing archi­tects and engi­neers around the world to deliver inspired sus­tain­able build­ings. Among them are Arup, Buro Hap­pold, Foster + Part­ners, Grimshaw Archi­tects, HOK, Kohn Ped­er­sen Fox, Mor­pho­sis, and SHoP Architects.