THE HILLIER GROUP RESTORES HISTORIC BANK IN PHILADELPHIA

Unveiled next week in Philadelphia will be the newly restored Girard Trust buildings, designed earlier this century by the New York firm of McKim Mead & White. In their newest incarnation, the buildings will become a Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The white Georgia marble of the historic domed structure, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, has emerged from decades of soot and exhaust to become a signature of the Center City Philadelphia's remarkable downtown renaissance.

BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGIES ON DISPLAY AT A/E/C SYSTEMS 2000

Full-featured CAD software in the palm of your hand? That's what visitors to A/E/C SYSTEMS 2000 saw this month in PocketCAD. This is a mobile tool for creating and working with drawings in the field, using a palm-size PC running Windows CE. Despite its size, users can use it to display, draw, and edit drawings converted from desktop DWG files. This and other innovative hardware and software tools will be featured in the third part of our coverage of the annual tradeshow for computing in architecture, engineering, and construction.

HOW WILL THE PRACTICE OF ARCHITECTURE CHANGE WITH NEW TOOLS?

Recent developments in computer-aided design software have enabled project teams to work not on individual drawings of buildings but on a centralized 3D model from which all drawings and analyses are generated. One such system is Bentley's MicroStation TriForma. Bentley Director of Research Robert Aish describes his vision of how this will affect the practice - and the very culture - of architecture and engineering.