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.