Tag Archives: Grasshopper

Reope

Reope is now the name of our company in Norway. We’re changing it from Bad Monkeys to Reope.

I have always been a late bloomer, and have finally come to understand that when you build a company, you also build a brand. And when you build a brand for a company, you need to control and own that brand. It’s as simple as that. We cannot control what the Bad Monkeys brand does, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to! I love the idea of the monkeys running wild, so to speak, and also think that anyone controlling the monkey brand would ruin the monkey identity.

So, we need the company and the network to be two different things; Reope – part of the Bad Monkeys network.

Being part of Bad Monkeys offers a lot of benefits. We collaborate on projects and products. We share resources and knowledge. And we meet up whenever global pandemics are not happening, which is always great fun.

Why Reope?

For us, Reope means a recurring surprise, or a new discovery by accident. It consists of re and ope, where re is Latin for starting over again, and ope is midwestern for oops! This is how it is to program for us. Like I tell my friends sometimes: I just click all the buttons and see what happens.

Our Reope rebrand launch video, where I explain to my mom what’s going on.

So how can Reope help you?

Reope operates as your software development department. Instead of hiring one developer who knows perhaps one or two things really well, you hire us and together we deliver a range of services to you based on what you need most. You get a team of specialists who obsess about delivering valuable tools to you and your organization.

If you’re a building owner, you want to hire us to help your project teams deliver better designs faster. Your hired guns will operate at a higher level of efficiency, deliver more information faster, and spend their time working on value-adding activities and not assembly line repetitive distant look monkey work.

If you’re an architect or engineer, you’ll hire us to reduce your team’s wasted time on projects by scaling your dream workflows to your entire organization. We help your colleagues understand automation and we increase your Level of Happiness (LOH) through the removal of meaningless tasks. You get better tools and processes and happier architects and engineers.

And if you’re a contractor, you would want to hire us to turn the above into profit.

Because we’re architects and engineers, we understand which problems you need to solve and why. That’s also why we deliver fast. Send us your Dynamo script today, and you get a Revit add-in tomorrow.

We have been doing this for 3 years now, and it works. If you want to know more about who we are and what we’ve done, have a look at our website. If you want to know more about our business model and pricing, call me on my phone at +47 918 67 069 or email me at havard@reope.com. If what you need aligns with what we do, we will make your life better.

Number One

The presentation Building Design with Revit, Rhino, Dynamo & Grasshopper I did with Thomas Benedict Holth from Dark Architects at Revit Technology Conference Europe 2015 in Budapest in October was today announced the best rated session at the entire conference.

We presented work on combining Genetic Optimization and Environmental Analysis Tools in Grasshopper with Building Information Modeling (BIM) in Revit. The material was developed from the work we did together on an architectural competition at Dark last winter, and it apparently resonated with the people who attended the session. Thanks all who came and liked the session! I think we had a great time together in the Grand Ballroom at the Corinthia Hotel.

One of the things I have come to like about my job is working together with people who master and are passionate about computational and visual programming tools, have lots of ideas about technology, and are enthusiastic about learning BIM. Thomas was one of the first guys who made me realize this, and it was a great pleasure to work with him. We did not win the competition, but the technology we developed together still baffles me and makes me think we won anyway.

Me presenting Thomas

Me presenting Thomas

Together with Thomas and me, I was thrilled to find our previous coworkers and first time RTC speakers Margarida Jeronimo Barbosa (now at Beck) and Arne Folkestad Bjelland (now at Grape) on the Top 10 list. I was nowhere near an list after my first RTC presentation in Vancouver in 2013, and I’m brutally impressed with how they dealt with the preparations, nerves and execution. Awesome work, Margarida & Arne! I am also specially pleased to note that my friends and fellow European Dynamo enthusiasts Andreas Dieckmann and Peter Kompolschek were recognized for their awesome event sessions by also figuring in the final top 10 list. Check out the entire list on Jose Fandos’ blog post: RTC Europe Top 10 Speakers.

Julien, me, Margarida, Arne and Andreas at the Corinthia

Julien, me, Margarida, Arne and Andreas at the Corinthia

I plan to publish some content from the presentation in the future, but for now I conclude with thanking some of the people we worked with on the competition:

Caroline Stokkebokjær Hjelseth who didn’t sleep for 48 hours straight; Jeanette Norin who always laughed and totally owned the Revit model; Kaja Kittang Kvande who kept pushing us with her determination and never-give-up attitude; Rene Damborg Jensen, the trend expert who kept producing when we were all high on no sleep and couldn’t concentrate; Olaf Kon (mr. K) who contributed so much to the entire project with great ideas from day one; Franziska Meizel who flew in from the sideline and nailed the main concept at the end; Marcin Kitala who started working at Dark just before deadline and made huge contributions to the modeling of the final concept – life saver!; Tommi Haferbier Nielsen and his team at Steensen & Varming in Copenhagen – always in a good mood and contributing to the creative process; Ambrogio Agnozi at ARUP who gave us so much insight and knowledge about different structural solutions and ways to communicate a design with hand sketches; Daniel Nielsen in Copenhagen for all the help developing the Grasshopper scripts after Thomas went to Africa – we owe you big time; and finally Christine Grape who was our mentor, leader and anchor until two weeks before deadline. Thanks all!

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