Happy 2013

I would like to post some photos of my trip to the dreamy German city of Weimar last month as a belated Christmas blessing. Thanks to Fredrik Kopsch, we - a group of Ph.D. students from KTH's Department of Real Estate and Construction Management - made a short trip to Bauhaus University and participated in an amazing colloquium together with students from the corresponding department at the German university.

Weimar is a unique cultural venue in the sense that the city is rich in cultural monuments and memorials spanning over such a wide temporal period that encompasses Goethe and Schiller from the 17th century as well as the Bauhaus movement and modern art and architecture.

Bauhaus University - Mensa

Bauhaus University - Main building

The University Library

Weimar Schloss

Goethe and Schiller - Theaterplatz

BIM for FM

A presentation for the course Facility Management (AI2119) last month forced me to put together my results so far. The initial part was as usual a short summary on Building Information Modelling (BIM), its definitions and common applications. This was followed by an introduction to the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) contract method as a business enabler in building industry. The necessity of BIM for this approach by underpinning informed work flows was then demonstrated in a couple of slides. The third  and last episode of this first part was a clarification of the need for a vendor-neutral all-inclusive implementation of BIM if it is truly aimed to be used for promoting an integrated approach. This is, as you may guess, the buildingSMART's initiative termed as open BIM.

The first part was a prelude to the second and the main part of the presentation on FM:BIM - BIM for facilities management. This was initiated with basics of facilities management with regard to the knowledge management tools and systems that are used in the field. Subsequently, problematic areas namely work flows, contracts and IT tools, a number of available standards (e.g. IFC and COBie) and tools (such as FMDesktop, ArchiFM and Bentley Facilities) were shortly introduced. The presentation was rounded off by some words on what I tend to call FM:BIM:BAS. Actually, not so many applications support simultaneous integration of the BIM model and the Building Automation Systems (BAS) into the FM application of the client. Onuma Systems and EcoDomus are two prominent examples.

Architectural Concept

Architects are mainly interested in form, engineers much more in technology and economy, and both groups are largely apt to fall into overpositioning in their assumptions. Construction managers, on the other hand, are more pragmatic and indulge themselves in communicating and planning their relationships. Architects often strongly deny that they follow some specific style, rather allege that they tend to adhere to a set of "guiding principles". 

These were conclusions of one of the students groups participating in the course "Architectural Concept" (AI2802). As part of the final session for project presentations, a number of construction projects were introduced mainly with regard to the relation among the designer and the construction manager. One of prominent examples was Aula: the 7-storey landmark at Karolinska Institute in Solna. The well-coordinated collaboration among the client (Akademiska Hus), the design firm (Wingårdh Arkitektkontor) and the contractor (NCC) has made it possible to bring the complex curvy mass of the building and its intricate glasswork detailings into reality. The students' conclusion was that the well-established and seamless oral communication among the two teams helped developing the trust required for underpinning a fruitful collaboration.

A number of mixed rental apartments and condominiums together with a number of public projects were also introduced with Rosenbergs and Vera consulting firms as the designer and Wallenstam as the contractor. All of these projects are located in Norra Djurgårdsstaden, the new sustainable district of Stockholm. Higher energy saving, better environmental performance, efficient rain water management and higher green building scores are some common goals in Norra Djurgårdsstaden; while economic hurdles of green roofs, structural difficulties with wide cantilevers of continuous balconies and conflicts with the Royal National City Park (Kungliga nationalstadsparken) on land exploitation are the main challenges.

The last presented project was The New Karolinska Complex (Nya Karolinska Solna - NKS) which I had briefly introduced in one of my previous posts: a mixed research, education and healthcare center located at the conjunction of and joining together the two municipal divisions of Solna and Stockholm. NKS will be the third but the foremost component of the planned lifecycle cluster encompassing Stockholm University (SU), The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and NKS. The major design firms - White and Tengboom - have aimed to provide equipped rooms, a combination of modern and light and brick-like materials, a handful of artworks and interior intricacies as well as uninterrupted machine pathways all around the building. These are devised respectively for a commendable integration with the existing urban context, a warm and hospitable atmosphere for patients and their visitors and robot-aided transportation of clothes and instruments. The major criticism against the design is though the lower number of beds maintained compared with existing facilities.

Initiatives such as the course "Architectural Concept" are valuable steps towards a more collaborative approach to education of building construction and design. The course was being held at the KTH School of Architecture aiming for exposing the construction managers of tomorrow to the atmosphere, mindsets and working contexts of design professionals of the future. The career is heavily dependent on an array of digital tools that over increasingly demand for more trans-disciplinary collaboration and converging workflows.

Sources:
http://www.ncc.se/sv/Byggnader/Offentliga-byggnader/aula-karolinska-institutet-solna/
http://stockholmprojekt.blogspot.se/2012/02/norra-djurgardsstaden-norra-2.html
http://www.nationalstadsparken.se/default.aspx?id=1777
http://www.nyakarolinskasolna.se/

An informed and collaborative conception process and so on and so forth

1.

As part of the course "Architectural Concept", I gave a lecture yesterday at KTH School of Architecture, about characteristics of the ultimate digital media for design conception. It was preceded by an appealing and inspiring presentation of a selected array of works of Tham and Vinegård architectural office by Martin Vinegård. The new School of Architecture of KTH with its radically curvature exterior was among the works.

The first and main part of my presentation was an assortment of brief introductions to a number of subjects with regard to their relation to building design initiation and implemented tools and media for this purpose: architectural concept, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), Building Information Modelling (BIM) and BIM model servers.

Since not all students were familiar enough with topics such as BIM and IPD, it was not possible to fully focus on the main theme of building conception tools, though I utilized such an index-style and summed it up all by introducing concrete examples of available digital tools in the field. Examples varied across a broad range of media from environmental analysis plug-ins for SketchUp such as gModeller, IES VE and OpenStudio to collaborative and integrated use of Excel sheets, SketchUp and Onuma BIM Server. My intention was to emphasizes the importance of interoperable and easy-to-use digital tools for realizing an interactive, collaborative, information-rich, analytic and visual building conception process.

2.

I got both surprised and delighted when Jonas Runberger showed me their 3D printer and some basic "printed" volumes in School of Architecture since I had already indulged myself for some time in reading about the phenomenon here and there. There are lots of potentials in this trend; yet in order that building industry may in its full capacity benefit from 3D printing for automation and optimization, fabrication and manufacture of building products and material among all need to undergo revolutionary changes.

3.

Finally, contacts were made for arranging a 3D laser scanning experiment here in our department and I am enthusiastically looking forward to that. Newly-constructed buildings are only a small fragment of the entire building stock. Hence, in order to be able to efficiently preach and practice approaches such as sustainability and BIM, it is strongly required to capture existing built environment and translate the data into pieces of knowledge that are commensurate and compatible with our contemporary building information. 3D laser scanning has proved to be an opportune entry gate to this field.

Architectral Competitions

Last Thursday, 13th September 2012, 17:00, a discussion meeting on architectural competitions was held at the Technical Committee House (Tekniska Nämndhuset) jointly by the City Planning Office of Stockholm (Stadsbyggnadkontoret) and the Swedish Association of Architects (Stockholms Arkitektförening). The panel was composed of Karolina Keyzer (City architect), Catherina Fored (SA), Boel Hellman (SA), Yves Chantereau (Sveriges Teknik och Design), Torun Hammar (Statens Fastighetsverk) and Magnus Rönn from KTH as expert. Erik Jarlöv from SA and Niklas Svensson from the City were the moderators.

This was in fact a discussion on part of the Chapter 4 of the architectural guidelines for the city of Stockholm which has been composed by the City Planning Office and is now being put into consultation chapter by chapter to be incrementally modified and completed. Here comes a summary of discussions:

Current binding and recommended principles and guidelines for formations of physical body of the city are mainly articulated in the two available official documents: Stockholm's Vision 2030 and Stockholm's comprehensive plan. The former determines what should be built in Stockholm, while the latter clarifies where exactly those constructions should take place. Architecture Stockholm 1.0 will in turn specify how this should be realized.

It has happened many times before that the winning design has eventually put aside and replaced by some other design in the construction phase. It is thus of great importance for the jury to be able to also evaluate technical and economical feasibility of designs parallel to their functional and aesthetic and merits. One of the approaches that can guarantee implementation of the elected design is devising a firm juridical framework in advance. One of the EU regulations for architectural competitions is that not only the generalities of submitted designs but also the program of the design should be approved by the jury.

City Planning Office's initiative for this purpose is a new framework for architectural competitions that aims to merge the two stages of competition process and planning process to make the overall design period shorter and minimize the risk of expiration of the solutions provided by the winning design. In this approach, a combined team of jury and advisory board will help integrate the initiation phase, information phase, vetting, approval, passage and implementation.

A report on architectural competitions of different types (open and invited) in different countries demonstrated that the annual number of such competitions in Sweden i dramatically lower (even per inhabitant) compared with other developed countries. In 2011, only eight architectural competitions were held in Sweden, while this number in the same period was 40 in Norway, 60-70 in Denmark, 60-70 in Finland, 200 in Switzerland and so on and so forth.

In many countries, participation of young architects and architectural firms are encouraged in variety of ways (wild cards) and in general, competitions are considered as cultivators of cherished and congenial architecture. Architectural competitions promote innovation and pluralism. Clients and politicians can be very determining in abundance and quality of architectural competitions. In Denmark, speed-dating among participating architects and construction firms is an established routine and in Finland, there is a high emphasis on transparency and web-based communication of designs. 

It was discussed whether competitions impose extra costs to the building and thus make it more expensive. Opponents to this believed that a competition with an appropriate program outline and implementation will not affect the overall expenditures of the building adversely. Examples are when limited budget of the project has compelled active engagement of participants also in economical administration issues and the urge by the program for reflecting on this aspect in submitted proposals.

In the final moments of the meeting, some participants spoke out against the "wild card" concept reasoning that extensive and technical projects require experienced design teams with established connections and qualified partners. This was however strongly rejected by the majority of panel addressing some successful falsifying examples.

ECPPM 2012

Dinner gathering at Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center in Reykjavik 

Last Wednesday during our weekly lunch seminar at Department of Real Estate and Construction Management (KTH), I made a short report on the 9th European Conference on Product and Process Modeling (ECPPM 2012) that was held 25 - 27th July in Reykjavik (Iceland). This was a brief introduction of four works that I had found to be the most influential and merited among those that were relevant to my field of research.

Of the wide variety of topics and tracks, these sounded to be the closest to what we do here at the Division of Project Communication: modeling, interoperability, collaboration and team working, smart buildings, ICT based products, services and innovative and emerging ICT technologies. The initial session was opened by the President of Iceland's (Dr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson) speech which addressed among all environmental concerns in building industry and how this can be enhanced by a more widespread and shrewd use of IT technologies such as BIM. Keynote speakers then gave amazing talks mostly focused on challenges around efficient deployment of BIM in construction and interoperability.

Here are my choices:

1) Collaborative engineering with IFC: New insights and technology (by L.A.H.M. van Berlo, J. Beetz, P. Bos, H. Hendriks and R.C.J. van Tongeren) 

The shift in perception of interrelations among domain-specific building models (1998)

This research is mainly developed at TNO and Eindhoven University of Technology and clarifies the authors' new approach to the "model" part of "building information model". The point of departure is the historical change in perception of building models from a network of inter-related discipline-specific models to a "shared data model". The authors suggest that it is again time to clarify that this "shared model" can not contain all information from different domains but is simply a "reference model", an aggregated model" or a so-called "federated model" which is limited in use (only used for functionalities such as checking, analysis and coordination) and can well be communicated through IFC (Industry Foundation Classes).

Authors' suggsted data exchange scenario among building disciplines

The authors have also delineated dichotomies such as little BIM/big BIM and homogeneous software environment/plural data environment.

2) BIM as a centre piece for optimised building operation (by B. Cahill, K. Menzel & D. Flynn)

Researchers at University College Cork in Ireland and their partners have published results of their studies on optimization of open-source BIM for using it in building operation in this project. Their goal is devising a less manual and error-prone data transfer and integrating wired and wireless sensed building data sources. For this purpose, the authors have studied a system composed of ITOBO (Information Technology for Optimized Building Operation), BIMserver (which is produced by authors of the previous article presented here) and Berkley Database.

Data Cube

Their eventual suggestion is integrating the data in a datawarehouse which in turn builds up a Data Cube. This way, the original BIM which has been created and enriched during design and construction phase, can also survive and be constant synchronized with new data and exploited during the rest of the building's life-cycle.

3) Life-cycle building control (by E.W. East, C. Bogen & M. Rashid)

This work by the Engineer Research and Development Center in United States is built over the previous initiative introduced by East: the COBie (Construction Operation Building information exchange). This was aimed at development of open standards for contracted exchange of building information and "describe the content of building asset information deliverables regardless of the low-level format in which that information is transported".

This time, authors introduce LCie (the Life-Cycle information exchange) to also integrate data from design- and construction intent models with inputs from sensors and metering and control systems. The aim is enabling facility managers to easily control their resources in practice as well as creating grounds for an efficient and authentic environmental performance evaluation of the building.

Sensor Fusion Platform

The article is enriched by introduction of basic data transfer requirements i.e. defined "sourcing" and "using" routines and current approaches to evaluation of environmental performance for a better comprehension. Future plans for developing a Sensor Fusion Platform in collaboration with BIMserver and oBIX-based OX Framework have also been outlined.

4) Accessing large 3D BIMs from mobile devices (B.D. Larsen)

This work is an interesting representative of efforts for facilitating non-expert users' access to BIM developed at Dalux (Denmark). The author's suggestion (a web-based application which was also demonstrated in the conference room) is designed for mobile devices and uses cloud servers. 

The aim is making more stakeholder BIM-capable by developing a user-friendly, interoperable and fast device with the fewest number of clicks and menus possible. This tools takes in different formats, uses IFC as internal format and is fully cross-disciplinary and interactive.

PS. At the concluding ceremony, the work by Robert Zach from Vienna University of Technology received the Best PhD Paper prize and Vienna was chosen as the venue for the next ECPPM accasion. During and after the conference, we made wonderful visits to Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center and the Blue Lagoon Geotermal Spa. Iceland is a fantastic country with unique breathtaking landscapes and a small but vibrant and open society.

:)

Leon did not expect at all that I would take his words seriously and actually write to his boss and complement on his presentation on "issues around a central model for the entire project".

I too did not expect such a facsinating and inspiring reply from the head of TNO, Jan Mengelers:

Dear Pouriya Parsa, 

On behalf of TNO I thank you very much for passing the compliment you have for Leons presentation to Leons ‘boss’. I appreciate this, because if any, I mostly get complaints and seldom the compliments.
Not about Leons contribution, of course! Nor about the other 4500 employees, but only on my own performances. Your last remark about “mission completed” may be correct for this small mission, but for the real stuff it takes a bit more. 

Maybe another well-known mission, I sometimes like to refer to, is that of Starship Enterprise of Star Trek “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, its 5 years mission… to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. 

I believe all scientific research should contribute to a better world and to the benefit of mankind. This is an everlasting mission. I hope Leons presentation was a contribution to that. It is a pity that I am not familiar with Leons presentation. I will ask him to send it to me in order to confirm your judgement.
Thanks again for your compliment!

Kind regards,
Jan Mengelers

I, in turn, appreciate Mr. Mengelers's attitude. One does not recieve such letters every morning!

BIM Repository Workshop

On 28th and 29th June, BIM Repository Workshop was held at KTH. Arto Kiviniemi (Salford), Chuck Eastman (Georgia Tech), Vladimir Bazjanac (LBNL), Robin Drogemuller (Queensland UoT), Bob Owen (Salford, IDDS), Jacob Beetz (TU Eindhoven, BIMserver.org), Robert Amor (University of Auckland, IDDS), Patrick Houbaux (Eurostep, BIM servers), Jiri Hietanen (Datacubist, MVD, BLIS), van Berlo (TNO, BIMserver.org) and Väino Tarandi (KTH) participated, presented their works and contributd their points of view to the group during the workshops. Nick Nisbet (AEC3, COBie WP in the UK) and Thomas Olofsson (Luleå Technical University) were not able to attend.

A variety of topics were discussed and potential solutions for ambigious areas in the field were brainstormed. Requirements management, versioning and change management, partial model exchanges, server query facilities, system and service integration throughout the whole lifecycle, model responsibility, data ownership, long transactions and consolidation and data integrity in BIM were among the topics. The outcomes will be soon published as a white-paper. 

Jakob, me and Vladimir in Rökeriet, photo by Arto

OK, I am not here for a long post this morning. Just found it worthwhile to quote Brian Lighthart's golden statement which truely holds when addressing use of an integrated lifecycle-supporting collaborative Building Information Model by all actors in AEC/O. He has nonetheless articulated this in a general way also encompassing traditional formats such as dwg files:

I suppose the logic is "Why should I redraw this when that work is already done?". That logic is sound, but it ignores the contracts and the money involved.

... and the ensuing questions are not less stimulating and pertinent to contemporary debates in the field:

Do the agreements say anything about sharing drawings? Who decides what layers are visible, or included in the dwg as furnished? Who pays for the time to vet, assemble and convey the files, and deal with any communications problems or misunderstandings as to the content of the files?

Here is another piece of uncomfortable truth put forward by Dominic Seah (I can not confirm it):

At the moment, standard contracts in the UK, and i suspect in the US as well, prioritise the delivered 2D info over the BIM model.

I would like to come back to this later on. This is about somewhere in the industry where the boundaries are being pushed forward on a daily basis; and need to be done so, even at a faster pace in near future.

Source: LinkedIn

NKS: hopes and scruples

Now, it can be said with no hesitation that reconstruction of Slussen can no longer be entitled as the most spoken-about construction project in Stockholm. The New Karolinska Solna university hospital has recently been the source of a mass of both news and gossips, acclaiming, scrutinizing, criticising or harshly dissenting.

The New Karolinska Solna project (NKS) is defined as a public private partnership (PPP) with an integrated project delivery (IPD) approch: Swedish Hospital Partners (SHP) has undertaken design, construction, administration and maintenance of the buildings and facilities until 2040 together with the construction firm, Skanska and the British finance company, Innisfree. The County Council has assumed to pay a total amount of 52 billion Swedish Crowns in return. The project covers an area of 320 000 sqm. and will be completed by 2016.

According to recent news, the Stockholm County Council is considering possibilities for abolishment of the contract. This has triggered a complete state of shock, confusion and denial among those who are either engaged in or concerned about the project. As far as I am concerned, that will be pity and disappointing if a state-of-the-art and multi-disciplinary construction project as such is halted for any reason. NKS can in fact be a milestone in application of BIM in Swedish building industry. Ramböll consulting company is the administrator for provision of BIM strategies for NKS. Ramböll's representative and a promoter of Open BIM, Hans Lif, hopes this project would be a breakthrough in shifting from inefficient paper and PDF specification documents and drawings to standardized modern forms of data management in building industry.

We strongly subscribe to this point of view here at BIM Collaboration Lab!

Sources:

http://www.dn.se/sthlm/sll-overvager-saga-upp-sjukhusavtal

http://di.se/

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/branscher/bank-och-fastighet/bygget-av-karolinska-kan-stoppas_7072151.svd

http://www.nyakarolinskasolna.se/

http://byggvarlden.se/nyheter/byggprojekt/article3092570.ece

http://www.netcommunity.se/201201165093/BYGG/BIM/Press/NVS-installerar-i-Nya-Karolinska-Solna-5093/menu-id-858
https://www.vardforbundet.se/Vardfokus/tidningen/2011/Nr-9-2011-9/Uppdrag-Byggaframtidens-vard/

SIRAP's Pakistani night

It was about two years ago when I joined SIRAP's (Stockholm International Researchers' Association) board since I had found the group an amazing multinational team with members from different universities, scientific backgrounds and nationalities. I was keeping an eye over their activities these years and even planned  to rejoin them several times but could not make it until quite recently.

My first collaboration with the group at Pakistan Cultural Evening last night was incredibly joyful and rewarding. Guys from Pakistan Student Association joined us at Studentpalatset with impressive presentations on Pakistan, its people, art and nature followed by superb Pakistani dishes. I met a dozen of friends from school and got a glimpse of Pakistan's culture, past and present; things that you never notice if you just follow the news.

I am sure about and also look forward to having immense opportunities of fun and delight in the future by contributing to SIRAP's ensuing educative and recreational activities. You are all also welcome!

BIM Collaboration Lab

KTH BIM Collaboration Lab is located at Stockholm, KTH main campus, Brinellvägen 1, 1st floor. Here are the initial sketches for the lab that I made according to Väino's drafts and how it looks like at the time. The interior will be completed in near future and the number of seats will be increased to ten during workshops. The lab will be transferred to a more spacious room when the basic activities are practiced for a while and further requirements for an ideal functionality are determined.

The lab will be a meeting place for all interested actors in ACE/FM industry and BIM experts for sharing their points of view and experiences on application of BIM, gains and losses, opportunities and hinders also for contributing to discussions on standardization of data formats used within the wide variety of ACE/FM branches.

SUCH -, the Sustainable Urban Collaboration Hub - will be developed here based on empirical requirements for an integrated, standardized and neutral information system that facilitates smooth and steady flow of information through different phases of program, design, construction, administration and recycling of the building also among the variety of participating groups. To explain the aim of such a platform in a clear and concise way: SUCH is expected to help optimizing planning and design procedure, minimizing loss of information and redundant work, increasing the profit, reducing design and construction time and promoting an integrated and environmental-friendly approach towards planning and design.


The aforementioned are in fact often mentioned as advantages for use of BIM - Building Information Modelling in general. Nonetheless, those objective would have never been fulfilled unless ubiquitous adoption and seamless application of BIM  is realised. This is in fact the main inducement of the escalating tradition of establishment of BIM labs by schools and ACE firms.

To build or not to build, is this the problem?

Quite much has been said recently about the shortage in housing supply specifically in larger cities of Sweden. Hans Lind, professor of Real Estate at KTH alleges that the four major construction corporations deliberately strangle supply of housing. Researcher in housing, Rune Wigren, also thinks that those four giant construction firms in the country are not competitive enough with each other. The prices of building materials have increased more than the salary of construction workers. This should have not been the case had production of buildings experienced a corresponding growth.

During the last decade, the average number of residential units per thousand inhabitants constructed in Sweden has been approximately half of that in other Nordic countries. The National Housing Credit Commitee (BKN) has evaluated that 35000-40000 new appartments should be built in Sweden every year. This used to be realized before the financial crisis in 2008. The amount was then reduced to 15000 houses per year during 2009 and 2010. The figure for the year 2012 is estimated to be 2500.

The amount of investments in residential buildings is naturally influenced by both house prices and production costs. It is however an almost established principle an increase in house prices yields in an increase in construction rate. Bengt Hansson, analyst at BKN believes that such high prices as those of today is thus a very suitable situation for construction. The International Collaboration Organization (OECD) asserts however that this is the high prices of building material has slowed down the construction pace. 

Jonas Granström, head of housing development of the Swedish headquarter of Skanska (the biggest construction corporation in Sweden) blames the economic situation for decrease in housing construction despite huge demand in the market. Granström recognises that the prices for houses have had no change for a long time. He believes that this is a result of well-thought initial prices.

Source: http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/de-vill-inte-bygga-bostader

The passion of the BIM

For me industriously struggling with inefficiencies of AutoCAD for almost a decade, possibilities brought about by BIM technologies (Building Information Modeling) have been astonishing, tempting and irresistible since I got to know it. Here are only some examples of typical difficulties in architectural design and producing construction drawings using traditional CAD: tedious and  iterative drafting jobs when something is being changed at a late phase in design, difficulties with incorporating construction details from manufacturers' catalogues to drawings of various scale and absence of the time factor in workshop drawings which in turn resulted in a rupture between design and construction procedures. Nonetheless, I was mostly occupied by studio-based design jobs at the time and had thus no idea of the most substantial strengths of BIM.

As part of my role in a research project at KTH, I have now the opportunity to dig deeper into the contemporary challenges on use of BIM and its prospects and risks. 

A shallow study led me to the following conclusions regarding hinders and hesitations of the practitioners (mostly AE firms since they are those in the forefront of acknowledging, implementing, using and promoting BIM):

• Segregated use: while it is not feasible to leap into BIM in full capacity due to logistics, learning curves, market inertia, etc.), using BIM in a limited way and with limited staff is in contrast with the nature of this tool.
• Lack of content: a BIM model is hungry for being filled up with detailed and accurate information to deliver the optimized output it is expected to produce. This, however, requires adoption of the tool by other partners or time- and cost-taking manual work which is not always affordable. 
• Using BIM in full capacity: the very eventual goal of BIM technologies is to realize an integrated design and construction procedure, while practical problems hinder free flow of information required for this purpose and limits the use of BIM to some secondary areas e.g. conceptual massing and clash discovery. 
• Legislative limitations: documents required for bids and project delivery are not updated. Required formats should thus be extracted from the BIM repository or simply specs and BOM's sould be used for the purpose of submission for bids,contracts, etc.
• Market inertia: this one of course applies to all new software and even new versions and variations of an existing software family. Actors in various fields, scales and economies require time to comprehend the added-value of using BIM in their specific area of expertise, examine, adopt and master it and in turn spread the word to others within the huge community of building and design.

Undoubtedly, the list can be complemented with many more items depending on location on earth, building styles and user groups. 

TO BE CONTINUED...

Karlsson & Co. II

First, happy 2012! Wish each and everyone a prosperous year!

Next;
During vacation, I had the opportunity to complement my previous post on refurbishment of Karlsson & Company and develop a set of past/present/final combinations of the photos and plan drawings of rooms which you can see here.

PS.  Owners have recentl y decided to change the name of the restaurant-bar to "Cristal". This will certainly have its implications when contemplating on interrior in more details I assume.