BIM Design

Realising the Creative Potential of Building Information Modelling

Richard Garber

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118719800
• eBook ISBN: 9781118719794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

Building information modelling (BIM) is revolutionising building design and construction. For architects, BIM has the potential to optimise their creativity while reducing risk in the design and construction process, thus giving them a more significant role in the building process. This book demonstrates how innovative firms are using BIM technologies to move design away from the utilitarian problems of construction, engaging them in a stunning new future in the built environment.

Whereas recent books about BIM have tended to favour case-study analyses or instruction on the use of specific software, BIM Design highlights how day-to-day design operations are shaped by the increasingly generative and collaborative aspects of these new tools. BIM strategies are described as operations that can enhance design rather than simply make it more efficient. Thus this book focuses on the specific creative uses of information modelling at the operational level, including the creative development of parametric geometries and generative design, the evaluation of environmental performance and the simulation and scheduling of construction/fabrication operations.

This book also engages BIM's pragmatic efficiencies such as the conflict checking of building systems and the creation of bills of quantities for costing; and in so doing it demonstrates how BIM can make such activities collaborative.

Throughout, projects are used to illustrate the creative application of BIM at a variety of scales. These buildings showcase work by fi rms executing projects all over the world: SHoP Architects and Construction (New York), Morphosis (Los Angeles), Populous (London), GRO Architects (New York), Reiser + Umemoto (New York), Gensler (Shanghai) and UNStudio (Amsterdam).

CHAPTER 1

INFORMATION MODELLING TODAY

We are in the midst of a virtual re-contextualization or re-embedding that, although it is in no way a return to the premodern contextualization or interlinking of science, religion, art, etc. is nevertheless a stepping beyond the specific autonomies of modernity. As one aspect of this phenomenon one can note that modern technology no longer exists as such – or at least is more and more ceasing to exist. Technology proper has been or is in the process of being supplanted by a post-technology, a hyper-technology, or what I prefer to call a meta-technology. Under such historical conditions the philosophy of technology can be seen as an epoch-specific event that is coming to an end, that is petering out in a kind of exhaustion or displacement. If this is true, then the philosophy of technology may well be in the process of being replaced – not with a philosophy of meta-technology but by philosophy in a general sense that re-incorporates into itself reflection on the meta-technical condition of the postmodern techno-lifeworld.¹

Carl Mitcham, 1995

Building information modelling (BIM) provides the entire design and construction team with the ability to digitally coordinate the often complex process of building prior to actual construction. As a new design methodology rooted in the technological advances afforded to design practice in the 1980s and 1990s, BIM allows the designer to examine ‘many more facets of the project, at the initial sizing stage, using sophisticated computer graphics tools’.² This method of construction delivery has become known as integrated project delivery, or IPD. Unlike computer-aided drafting, which simply allowed documentation to be drawn in the computer, BIM links three-dimensional geometry with real-time databases. Through this single, shared information model, the design team can iterate, simulate and test all aspects of construction prior to their operation on the project site. If inaccuracies can be corrected virtually prior to construction, material and time savings can be passed on to the architect, general contractor and owner – the three parties typically involved in a construction project. BIM is a technology that not only affects how we construct buildings (the efficiencies and operations), but how we design them as well. For Mario Carpo, ‘digitally designed architecture is even more prone to participatory modes of agency, as from its very beginning the theory of digital design has posited a distinction in principle between the design of some general features of an object and the design of some of its ancillary, variable aspects’.³ The duality inherent in BIM brings construction and design together under the rubric of a shared information model, while still promoting the architect as a creative director of sorts – who authors design intent, or a project’s general features, and then supervises a collaborative team of experts who each input data, or variable aspects, into the model.

1 GRO Architects, book organisation, 2012
The development of a building information model from design to construction, will be characterised as virtual geometry, the line, which begins to accept additional data, or constraints, as it is refined from sketch form to building proposal. Two-dimensional drawing production can be accommodated, via the profile, or sectioning of virtual geometry, and leads to the generation of the toolpath for computer numerically controlled actualisation or analogue construction.

2 Vripack, system piping production information, Sneek, the Netherlands, 2013
The shipbuilding and aerospace industries have relied heavily on two aspects of BIM that are only now having an impact on architectural design and the construction industry. First, ship designers have created integrated virtual models that take into account routing of all systems within a boat hull and allow for checks against collisions. Such models allow for the production of shop drawings used by the fabrication team that include individual part information and bills of quantities. Second, these models allow for both automated and manual prefabrication of these ship systems.

WHAT CAN THE DESIGNER EXPECT?

Building information modelling promises that a single, intelligent model can contain and coordinate the following information:

• Construction documentation
• Visualisation (design and construction)
• Material and equipment quantities
• Cost estimates
• 4-D construction sequencing and reporting
• Scheduling
• Fabrication data and toolpaths.

By adopting an information-modelling platform, architects and designers can:

• Visualise multiple design organisations
• Simulate alternatives
• Identify clashes between building equipment
• Communicate design intent three-dimensionally
• Improve productivity.

For David J Andrews, Professor of Engineering Design at the University College of London, ‘The general standardizing of software practice, operating systems, data exchange formats and general purpose CAD systems is so pervasive that the practice of design is effectively dominated by its capabilities, which the computer revolution now provides.’⁴ Information modelling tools ultimately replace the CAD tools adopted towards the end of the 20th century with an integrated, parametric database that is shared and refined during the design process, taking advantage of the enhanced graphic, memory and storage capacities of desk- and laptop computers. This database – or information model – contains specific three-dimensional geometric information such as sizes, areas and volumes as well as: cost data, material and component quantities, zoning analysis, environmental performance and instructions for fabrication and construction. While such a model may ‘look like’ the three-dimensional visualisations possible in CAD packages, information models contain an inherent design intelligence that fosters collaboration between those on the design team and those who build the design itself. In addition to a three-dimensional modelling environment, information modelling packages include workspaces for sketch design, simulation for sustainability or construction purposes, two-dimensional drawing output and numeric export to spreadsheets or other hardware for scheduling or digital fabrication. Each of these aspects of designing within the building information modelling environment will be explained.

3 Studio Daniel Libeskind with architect-of-record Davis Partnership Architects, extension to the Denver Art Museum, Frederic C Hamilton Building, Denver, Colorado, 2006
By understanding the museum as a virtual three-dimensional construction prior to building, Studio Daniel Libeskind was able to translate the sweeping forms of the building’s exterior to interior spaces, such as this contemporary art gallery.

A commonly referred-to example of this process is the Denver Art Museum by Daniel Libeskind and a large US general contractor, Mortenson Construction. Though Libeskind developed a preliminary digital model, the contractor invested the time and effort to develop a complete virtual model that contained not only geometric information – like Libeskind’s – but also complete ‘4-D’ (time-based) clash reporting and construction sequencing so that the entire building process could be studied virtually before construction began. The investment paid off; the Denver Art Museum was completed in 2006, three months ahead of schedule and with no cost overruns despite the building’s daring geometric form. The conceptual ambitions of the designer-author who uses BIM tools still cannot be replaced.

Still, this early success story only begins to describe the potentials of the building information modelling paradigm we have entered. While there have already been several books taking a case-study approach to how BIM promises amplified efficiencies to architects, contractors and owners from a cost-saving point of view, very little has been written about how these tools allow for rationalisation and optimisation of design intentions for architects at far earlier points in the project development process. How the architect as author can take advantage of these tools to amplify qualitative intentions that are not necessarily quantifiable in terms of cost savings or more pragmatic efficiencies is an area of BIM that is underexplored. The aim of this book is to further expose pragmatic efficiencies while expanding the notion that BIM allows for an entirely new type of design process using an augmented suite of tools that engage issues of contemporary design.

For Kenneth Frampton, speaking at Yale University in 2010:

Architecture by definition aspires to a state of cultural synthesis and so cannot be made totally consistent in terms of criteria whose sole aim is to optimize production as an end in itself, since at its best, building culture incorporates values that transcend our current proclivity for maximizing the production/consumption cycle in every facet of life. At the same time, the material and operative transformations taking place in the building industry cannot be ignored by the profession, if for no other reason than that many of these innovations are coming from the profession itself.⁵

Through cohesive integration, BIM has the ability to resolve traditionally oppositional aspects of architecture such as theory/practice, academy/profession and design/construction. This resolution may yield a redefinition of what we think buildings should look like and how they should perform. As such, this book is organised to accommodate those already adept at using three-dimensional tools, and those just beginning the transition to information modelling. Information modelling and operations are broken down in the following way:

4 Studio Daniel Libeskind with architect-of-record Davis Partnership Architects, extension to the Denver Art Museum, Frederic C Hamilton Building. Denver, Colorado, 2006
For the construction of the 13,500-square-metre (146,000 ft²) project, the general contractor, Mortenson Construction, adopted BIM technologies and developed the three-dimensional model supplied by Libeskind to support the building’s construction. Mortenson’s team created building information models of the concrete and steel structure for quantification, formwork design, shop drawings and coordination. The building, and ultimately its design and construction process, received recognition from the American Institute of Architects’ fifth annual Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) Building Information Model (BIM) Awards in 2009.

5 Future Home Technology, prefabricated wall production, Port Jervis, New York, 2013
Increasingly, buildings are being constructed in factories using strict digital controls, much like the shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Future Home Technology, one of several prefabricated building manufacturers that have emerged in the greater New York City metropolitan region, promises customise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Foreword Mario Carpo
• Chapter 1: Information Modelling Today
• Chapter 2: The Master Builder and Information Modelling
• SHoP: Architects, Control and Construction: The Barclays Center
• Chapter 3: The C(reative)Onstruction Process, then and now
• Morphosis: Design Intent and Digital Iteration: Perot Museum of Nature and Science
• Chapter 4: New Methods: New Tools
• Populous: Curvilinear Workflows: Aviva Stadium
• Chapter 5: The Digital States and Information Modelling
• Gro Architects: Dense Agendas: Jackson Green Housing
• Chapter 6: Strategies for Component Generation
• Reiser + Umemoto: Architecture by (SEMI) Remote Control: Kaohsiung Port Terminal
• Chapter 7: Assemblies and their Simulation
• Gensler: Simulation Takes Control: Shanghai Tower
• Chapter 8: Conclusions: Authorship and Lines of Development
• UNStudio: Knowledge Architecture for a Life (Cycle): Education Executive Agency and Tax Offices
• Select Bibliography
• Key Search Terms
• End User License Agreement