There’s a lot of information to consider with BIM. Taking a look at a project by scape Landschaftsarchitekten can illustrate a few reasons why (and how) a dedicated BIM effort makes the design process a whole lot smoother and, as a result, more effective.

1. Standards for Everyone in the Project

Increasingly, BIM is required for professionals to work on a public project. Project owners are becoming keen on the benefits of information modeling.

The project being considered in this study is the Viega Group’s seminar center, which required a multidisciplinary planning process in accordance with BIM methodology and HOAI standards.

At the start of the project, all stakeholders agreed on a BIM specification plan. They began working in Big Closed BIM, where each collaborator used the same software — but the civil engineering and landscape architecture teams quickly discovered they could not work optimally with those restrictions. Moving to a Big Open BIM framework enabled a more collaborative, transparent, and generally open workflow free of proprietary software concerns.

As outlined in the project’s BIM Execution Plan (BEP), the standards set initially took guesswork out of the modeling process. scape modeled in Vectorworks Landmark, taking advantage of the built-in smart objects to meet requirements, knowing their geometry could be faithfully transferred to other programs later on in the process.

2. Information Modeling As Early As Conceptual Design

Another reason this project was so successful: setting standards early allowed for information modeling to occur even from the early conceptual drafting stages.

Geometry like plug-in objects and pre-assigned symbols came with IFC entities already. For custom geometry, scape could assign IFC data and attach parameters like key elevations, materials, plant species, and more, which resulted in a significantly streamlined design development phase. That geometry already had information attached, so design development was just a matter of ensuring all necessary data was present and accurate.

3. Superior Coordination

This integrated BIM process made turning over their file to the project’s BIM manager easy — this was done in DESITE MD (which works similarly to applications like Solibri, Navisworks, and BIM 360) via IFC.

This model checking is arguably the most important step in a collaborative workflow. Bringing each discipline specific model together into one program to check for cohesion would be much more complicated without design tools created specifically for this purpose.

The cloud-based coordination document was available for all collaborators to reference in their own BIM programs, again a testament to how this BIM framework is truly “open.”

Not only did a BIM process pioneer superior coordination between disciplines, but it also provided the Viega Group with all the information they needed for facilities management down the line. It was all right there in the coordination model. The BIM model thus acted as a container that structures and archives all data over the entire lifecycle of the facility and its site.

Published on February 10, 2021