BILT NA 2019 Keynote Speaker: Phil Bernstein

DBEI in incredibly proud to introduce Phillip G. Bernstein as the BILT NA 2019 Keynote Speaker! For those of us who’ve been in the AEC community for nearly two decades, Phil has been a thoughtful and circumspect thought leader capable of abstracting the latest / greatest design technologies and placing them in context of historic first practices. For those of you less familiar, please allow me to provide context.

He is an architect, technologist and educator and Associate Dean and Senior Lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture, where he has taught since 1988. He was formerly a Vice President at Autodesk where he was responsible for setting the company’s future vision and strategy for technology as well as cultivating and sustaining the firm’s relationships with strategic industry leaders and associations. Prior to joining Autodesk, Phil practiced architecture as a principal at Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects where he managed many of the firm’s most complex commissions.

Phil received a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude with Distinction in Architecture from Yale University and a Master of Architecture also from Yale. He is a a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and former Chair of the AIA National Contract Documents Committee.

Phil writes and lectures about practice and technology issues, and has been published extensively in:

• Architectural Records
• Architecture
• Architecture+Urbanism
• Design Intelligence
• Fast Company
• Fortune
• Perspecta

He’s also been quoted in The Economist, Vanity Fair, Dwell and The Wall Street Journal.

Phil is co-editor of Building (In) The Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture, published in 2010 by Princeton Architectural Press, as well as BIM in the Academia: Technology’s Implications for Practice and the Academy in 2011. His book Architecture | Design | Data – Practice Competency in the Era of Computation was published by Birkhauser in 2018.

Phil’s keynote topic for this year’s keynote is Architecture | Design | Data: Solving Wicked Problems of Practice in the Era of Computation.

More than a decade after BIM has become mainstream in the building industry, do we really know what it means? Early promises of revolution have largely gone unrealized. But with the advent of cloud-enabled computation, big data, and machine learning, perhaps BIM will only now see its real potential to transform design methodology, construction practice and the nature of the building enterprise itself. This talk will outline an argument about the emergent role of data, modeling, analysis, and simulation in a world where machines both accelerate and augment the agency of human designers and builders.

If you’ve ever had the good fortune of visiting Revit in Waltham, MA you’ll be pleased to know that Phil is deeply experienced in putting his ideas into practice. He was the executive responsible for Autodesk’s Waltham AEC Headquarters project, which received more than 14 architectural awards including those from the American Institute of Architects, Business Week/Architectural Record, the Association of General Contractors and Interiors Magazine. Phil was honored twice by DesignIntelligence as one of the “30 Most Admired Educators in Architecture” and was named as an Outstanding Industry Contributor in 2010 by the Connecticut Construction Institute.

Please join us in Seattle and welcome Phil Bernstein to the DBEI community this July!