Getting to Grips with BIM

A Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Architecture, Engineering and Construction Firms

James Harty, Tahar Kouider, Graham Paterson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138843974
• eBook ISBN: 9781317549833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Construction & Architectural Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

With the UK government's 2016 BIM threshold approaching, support for small organisations on interpreting, filtering and applying BIM protocols and standards is urgently required. Many small UK construction industry supply chain firms are uncertain about what Level 2 BIM involves and are unsure about taking first steps towards having BIM capability. As digitisation, increasingly impacts on work practices, Getting to Grips with BIM offers an insight into an industry in change supplemented by practical guidance on managing the transition towards more widespread and integrated use of digital tools to manage the design, construction and whole life use of buildings.

Part I The BIM journey

1 Historical paradigms

DOI: 10.4324/9781315730721-2

Figure 1.1 PhD facility project

1.1 Making and using buildings, people and processes

Thom Mayne said during the Building Information Panel Discussion (Mayne 2006) at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Convention in Las Vegas that: ‘It’s about survival. If you want to survive, you’re going to change; if you don’t you’re going to perish. It’s as simple as that … you will not practice architecture, if you are not up to speed with this…’. This was in response to: ‘By what means do the architects in this audience accelerate their understanding of this new technology and all its implications for practice?’ During the discussion, Patrick MacLeamy added: ‘This is happening, get with it or get over it. If we don’t do this, I don’t believe that we are going to be in business.’ Equally compelling and from the complete opposite end of the scale, a study in Hong Kong by Tse et al. (2005) saw the barriers around this time to BIM adoption as:

• no need to produce BIM;
• existing CAD systems were adequate;
• no desire to commit to extra cost;
• lack of skills;
• BIM could not reduce drafting time;
• not enough features;
• not required by clients; and
• not required by other project team members.

Of these, arguably the only remaining barrier is lack of skills. At that time, BIM was seen as a technology. Now it is accepted as a process (Eckblad et al. 2007).

Above and beyond the technology and the management, there is also BIM’s impact on society, in relation to how buildings shape our lives and influence our quality of life. Barrett addresses these concerns in looking at both what society deserves and how new methodologies augment change (Barrett 2011). Underwood and Isikdag also reflects on the impact of BIM where it is often seen by management as a utility tool (and not an intrinsic tool), meaning that it has been strongly affected by the economic crisis of 2008, where there have been significant cutbacks (Underwood and Isikdag 2011). This too has a large bearing on society and the quality of buildings produced. It does not go unnoticed that BIM offers worthwhile potential for growth, if properly adopted.

But in relation to this book, how BIM affects management regarding its implementation, sees four emerging dimensions:

• an integrated environment;
• distributed information;
• up-to-date information; and
• new derivatives of the information.

Underwood concluded that relatively new information technologies, such as cloud computing and sensor networks, could readily accommodate these societal needs.

To achieve the full potential of the new technologies, it is necessary to understand project information flows across all stakeholders. For example, speciality trade contractors at the end of the supply chain have noted a 67 per cent improvement to the flow of project information in the last two years (Bernstein and Russo 2013).

1.2 Discipline identities and interrelationships

One of the key disciplines in the construction discipline mix is the technologist. Professionally speaking, it could be said that architectural technologists were spawned out of the modern movement after the Second World War, amid a transition where the focus moved increasingly into the studio or drawing office. This represented a change in the building sector from crafts and handwork to technique, and from apprenticeships to documented processes and methods. This change can be charted right through the modern movement, where it relied heavily on new performance requirements, innovations and a much broader use of materials. Essentially, what can be chronicled is that responsibility and decision-making moved indoors.

Figure 1.2 PhD facility project – cross section

Technology, and, more importantly, architectural technology are very relevant today. A technologist is one who can implement, understand and communicate the new requirements in a salient, appropriate manner, stressing who is the bearer of this news and who can guarantee it safe passage, to those who can best be served by better-informed design, whether they are clients, users or society at large. Sustainability, energy consumption and embodied carbon are all a result of poor management and abuse of the finite resources this planet has to offer.

Construction activities, in general, are embedded in traditional methods, and many modern technologies are still derived from traditional knowledge or know-how, as is easily demonstrated in masonry, carpentry and plumbing. But there are also new drivers for innovation, for improvements in productivity, including performance, health and safety, quality management and a building’s unique qualities. The latter include sustainability, life-cycle analysis, purpose-in-use and the need for the present generation not to compromise future generations’ right to the same concession, meaning that change must be implemented, and new or better ways of procurement must be deployed to uphold that right:

Any technology is but one of many systems that presuppose a building: ecological systems, economic systems, social systems, etc. These multiple systems can be summarised by what Lewis Mumford called ‘technics,’ a term that describes the relationship between the technical systems and social systems in large-scale habits of mind and action in civilisation. Technics illustrates the collective theories, techniques and technologies that characterise paradigms of choices and practices.

(Moe and Smith 2012: 1)

Le Corbusier, in Towards a New Architecture (1921), noted that construction is at a designer’s fingertips in the same way that grammar is there for a thinker. But with an ever-increasing churn bringing continual change, this bank of experience is even harder to amass and accumulate. Mies van der Rohe distilled it even further:

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form. That is the reason why technology and architecture are so closely related. Our real hope is that they grow together, that someday the one will be the expression of the other. Only then will we have an architecture worthy of its name: Architecture as a true symbol of our time.

(Mies van der Rohe 2012)

Stephen Emmitt drew a comparison much less with time than with the society in which it is found:

If architecture is concerned with making society, it is the materials, components and fixings – the architectural technologies applied to abstract ideas and concepts – that helps to realise the built fabric in and around which society functions.

(Emmitt 2012: xii)

He also drew attention to a comment the technicians’ society made back in 1984:

‘Architectural technology is the constructive link between the abstract and the artefact.’ CIAT (formerly SAAT, 1984)

(Emmitt 2012: xii)

With these quotes we get a wonderfully compelling notion of what architectural technology can aspire to: becoming the expression of architecture, the realisation of our environment and the link forming the artefact. Padding this out, it can be said to affect the times we live in and the society of which we are a part, while breathing life into the abstractions of designers.

The synergy that drives the architectural technologist could also be said to derive from the artistic (which encompasses design and is somewhat intangible, albeit creative), the procedural (which is deliverable and managed) and the practical (which is functional, tangible and technological) (Emmitt). The cornerstones of the design manufacturing process start with a conceptual cycle where ideas are hatched. This evolves into a functional phase where there is an assessment of fit-for-purpose, to an aesthetical stage where the form emerges. From here, there is a transition from design to manufacture called fabrication. Finally, there is an underlying process to underpin the methodologies used in all the above operations (Kowalski 2012).

The Tower of Babel analogy has left a legacy that has never properly been addressed. Whatever about reaching the heavens and getting above our station, I could never resolve why the good Lord would wish to derail collaboration and introduce counterproductive devices into common parlance. Furthermore, the punishment for building violations by the Babylonian King Hammurabi’s building codes 4,000 years ago, stated:

229. If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death.

230. If it is the owner’s son that is killed, the builder’s son shall be put to death.

Medieval builders knew a great deal about how to build wonderful cathedrals, but their answer as to why those buildings stood up was to point to the hand of God, with a nodding testament that they followed traditional rules and mysteries of their craft.

Perhaps because they were too much obsessed by the moral significance of good workmanship, the old builders and the carpenters and shipwrights never seem to have thought at all, in any scientific sense, about why a structure is able to carry a load. … So long as there were no scientific way of predicting the safety of technological structures, attempts to make devices which were new or radically different were only too likely to end in disaster. … As it turned out the old craftsmen never accepted the challenge and it is interesting to reflect that the effective beginnings of the serious study of structures may be said to be due to the persecution and obscurantism of the [Roman Catholic] Inquisition. In 1633, Galileo fell foul of the Church on account of his revolutionary astronomical discoveries … Living … virtually under house arrest, he took up the study of the strength of materials, [it] … being the least subversive subject.

(Gordon 1978: 27–28)

What Jim Gordon is alluding to here is that a new role and discipline arose around this time that was independent of and unrelated to the craftsmanship of the medieval builders. He is also quite resolute in that it could not be any other way. Within architecture, there is a rollover effect from the Gothic master builders to the Renaissance architects, but it too suffered this chasm where new techniques gave rise to new methods, particularly in draughting and perspective views. In this, the pertinence, cohesion and comprehensiveness of an architectural response could be summarised by its quality of rigour (Burdett and Wang 1990).

Architecture has for far too long taught and practiced technology as an autonomous technocratic topic – often characterised by an unreflective technological determinism that results in technocratic courses, pedagogies, consultants and intellectual habits, and thereby engendering a range of problematic practices.

(Moe and Smith 2012: 2)

History cannot be touched without changing it.

(Giedion 1944: 5)

But not addressing these issues led Eduardo Souto de Moura to lament:

When I was … ready to go on, firemen had already defined the height, British consultants the pillars’ module (three cars), the en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I The BIM journey
• Part II A contemporary view of BIM in the UK
• Part III Teamworking and information management
• Part IV Setting up a BIM project
• BIM glossary
• Index