CIS/2, IFC, VRML, and X3D Product Data Standards Research for Structural Steel

The CIMSteel Integration Standards (CIS/2) is the product model and electronic data exchange file format for structural steel project information. CIS/2 is intended to create a seamless and integrated flow of information among all parties of the steel supply chain involved in the construction of steel framed structures. It has been adopted by the American Institute of Steel Construction as their format for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). CIMsteel stands for the Computer Integrated Manufacturing of Constructional Steelwork. The technical basis for CIS/2 is STEP (ISO 10301).

CIS/2 has been implemented as a file import or export capability by many steel design, analysis, engineering, fabrication, and construction software packages. A CIS/2 file exported by an analysis or design program could be imported into a detailing program to detail the connections.
CIS/2 itself is not a software package that you buy. The user will see it as file format, just like DXF is a file format, that is imported or exported in a steel related software package. However, some software vendors charge for their CIS/2 import or export feature.

The CIS/2 standard covers everything from nuts and bolts to materials and loads to frames and assemblies. Structures can be represented as analysis, design, or manufacturing (detailed) models. There is a logical relationship between the different types of models. For example, a beam in an analysis model that has to be subdivided for analysis is logically only one beam in the detailed model.

NIST served on the AISC's EDI Review Team that chose CIS/2 as the standard for electronic data interchange. NIST is currently helping software vendors implement the standard; helping steel designers, detailers, and fabricators use the standard; and is part of the CIS/2 International Technical Committee which oversees the standard and is working towards future releases of CIS/2.

This work is funded at NIST through the BFRL project Product Data Standards for Steel Construction as part of the CONSIAT program.

Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture

Exploring architecture from all regions of the world, this three-volume set chronicles and analyzes the twentieth century's vast architectural achievements, both within and well beyond the parameters of Modernism. With extensive coverage of architecture's multifaceted production from 1900 to 2000, the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture provides readers with a singular resource on materials, theory, design, and practice during this fascinating century of innovation.

An international collection of 300 writers—including architectural and urban historians, preservationists, architects, engineers, critics, and scholars—presents a comprehensive and critical assessment of buildings, architects, cities, technologies, planning, and numerous related topics. Over 700 cross-referenced critical essays range in length from 1,000 to 6,000 words and include bibliographies to facilitate further study. The entries are brought vividly to life by over 500 black-and-white illustrations, as well as 24 pages of color images, including architectural drawings, plans, and contemporary and historic photographs.

Unlike existing reference works on the subject, which are limited to biographical or regional coverage, the Encyclopedia analyzes the complexities of rapidly changing global conditions, helping users understand the dispersal of architectural types, movements, styles, and building practices across geographic and cultural boundaries. Readers will learn not only about noted architects, prominent firms, and influential buildings, but also about architecture's role—physical, social, artistic, and political—in the development of cities, countries, and regions worldwide.

Designed for the general reader as well as scholars and experts, the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture offers far-reaching coverage and provides a complete one-stop reference resource on architecture throughout the world over the past hundred years

Steel in 20th-Century Architecture

Sir Henry Bessemer

Steel is a material present in the structure of virtually all works of 20th-century architecture: in the connectors, plates, nails, bolts, and screws of timber floors and frames; in the deformed bars hidden within the cement and stone matrix of reinforced concrete; and in the hot-rolled wide-flange columns and beams characteristic of steel skeletal frameworks. While its history as a building material can be traced back at least to the fifth century B.C., and while its potential to revolutionize the whole process and form of building was in many ways already evident in the 19th century, it is in the 20th century that the architectural expression of steel was most thoroughly explored.



Steel refers to any metal consisting primarily of iron, although the term is now commonly used in a more restrictive sense, reserved for the mild carbon steels that first appeared in the mid-19th century and the high-strength, corrosion-resistant ("weathering"), and stainless steels developed more recently. Cast and wrought iron products had been used extensively in building, especially in the 19th century, but were largely superseded by the beginning of the 20th century by hot-rolled steel members. The ultimate victory of steel over earlier forms of iron was due to steel's superior structural properties along with an increasingly efficient manufacturing process—based on the innovations of Bessemer, Siemens, Thomas, and others—that dramatically reduced its cost while increasing its output. Stimulated first by the needs of the railway industry in the mid-19th century and later by a dramatic increase in large-scale building projects, construction in steel became inextricably linked with the accelerated pace of commercial and industrial development in the 20th century.


The economic and social changes accompanying this development met mixed reactions. Chicago architect Louis Sullivan found a kind of spiritual poetry in the steel frame's aspiration for verticality; Italian Futurist Sant'Elia proclaimed in 1914 that the steel bridges, railway stations, cars, and planes of the modern epoch already signaled a radical discontinuity with the traditional forms of the past; Russian Constuctivist Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for a spiraling steel monument to the Third International in 1920 provided a dynamic and optimistic visual image for the new technology. Yet other artists and critics saw only the negative social consequences of the 20th century's new steel-framed architecture: dark, canyon-like streets; anonymous, repetitive facades; degrading or dangerous working conditions. Steel was not simply the material par excellence of the industrial revolution; at the dawn of the 20th century it was also a potent symbol of economic power and monopolistic arrogance, personified in the legendary figures of Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Elbert H. Gary.


With the development of steel architecture other formal and technical issues have emerged: reconciling requirements for fire-proofing and corrosion protection with the desire for direct expression; exploiting the potential of standardization, prefabrication, and mass production; expressing the ideal of lightness and elegance, or the tectonics of load and resistance; incorporating the image of the machine (whether derived from industry, transport, or war) or the influence of other aesthetic tendencies (from constructivism to deconstruction). These issues are subsumed within the following discussion, which is based on three critical 20th-century building types: the office building, the long-span "shed," and the house.