BIM Perspectives

Recently I attended the BIM Perspectives event in Boston, hosted by Microsol Resources; it was an industry event that showcased different perspectives on Building Modeling from different construction project team members. The idea was for each of the respective disciplines to present their “view” on Building Information Modeling (BIM) and benefits they’ve seen within their respective trades.

Phil Bernstein, VP of Strategic Industry Relations at Autodesk started the event by introducing the topic and thoughts of “as humans we’ve been drawing for thousands of years, we’ve been creating building information models, and now we are onto something else.”

What is this third era? We might not be fully clear yet but we can see it involves the Building Information Model; through social networking collaboration, infinite cloud computing powering simulation and energy modeling, there are many uses and benefits from generating a building information model.

It is very interesting that each of the construction team have different benefits, the architects exploring creative design solutions that perhaps hadn’t presented themselves before they started their building models. Engineers finding similar design solutions in the structure or mechanical systems coordination; contractors saving time with prefabrication of repeated elements or by modeling the site for staging and scheduling of materials and equipment. Clients, who need to manage the building lifecycle, can also benefit from having a building information model. All of this information can be carried into the “field” through mobile connected devices.

One common theme was “communication,” everyone can generally benefit from being able to better communicate design options and possible solutions to each other and the client with the building model.

The options are endless, new applications providing new analysis solutions appearing all the time. BIM is not a panacea to better design but offers a lot of possible solutions for more intelligent design.