AEI Denver Conference Reflections

State of AEI

• I'm highly sympathetic to the organizers of the conference.  They depend on what's submitted for their technical content and clearly have made great efforts to increase the breadth and depth of the conference topics. Nonetheless, AEI exists, as the founder of the Institute reminded us at the awards luncheon, to bring together all those involved in the design of buildings.  My observation is that we have a long way to go towards that ideal, however much has been accomplished in its first decade. 
• I'd argue that Architectural Engineering's central charge is to consider the interactions between the disciplines, often shortened to "integrating" them.  However, the great majority of the presentations that  I scanned in the proceedings or viewed in the two days were single-discipline in nature.  They are certainly additions to the literature, but I suspect that many of them would be more widely accepted if presented in the literature of those specific disciplines. 
• There were indeed some in the design area, particularly those relating to BIM, that would appear to cross disciplinary lines, but they were a significant minority.
• One noticeable problem was speakers not appearing for their scheduled sessions, to the obvious surprise of the session moderators.  In one session I attended only one of four scheduled appeared (fortunately the speaker easily expanded his worthwhile if obviously oft-repeated BIM

Academic Council

• The academic council was the highlight of the conference (other than my Drexel students winning second place in the paper competition).  It was an opportunity to meet the folks who to this point were only voices on the phone.
• We had three hours of worthwhile discussion and elected Jay Puckett of Wyoming the next chair.  Having just spent time with him I'm quite sure he'll do a splendid job.

Conference Logistics

• The AEI/ASCE staff running the conference did a good job dealing with the vagaries of the convention and people like me who lost their name tag.
• To me it's ironic to hold an AEI conference in as splendid a climate as Denver's in hotel having a completely sealed environment.  That the HVAC control system in my room didn't work properly was no help.