World Building Congress 2013 - 2

As I had promised in an earlier post, here comes a synopsis of the works presented at a selection of the sessions I attended during the World Building Congress 2013. Summaries are grouped according to their subject area rather than the chronological order of presentations:

a) Briefing

Peter Johansson from Jönköping University in Sweden touched on the value of use of IT in the briefing phase. His suggested solutions were DRofus and PTS applications which are based on the concepts of standard rooms and functional requirements. Visualizing and discussing a set of devised solutions early in the design process are essential parts of any efficient briefing process according to him.

b) Design

Bob Giddings from Northumbria University in the UK lectured on architectural design quality evaluation with an example from sheltered houses in North East England. One of the most important issues that he raised was that performance aspects of design alternatives could easily be documented and evaluated, while more qualitative measures such as atmosphere, comfort, and aesthetics cannot be captured with normal tools. In line with this, the lecture by Sebastian Macmillan from Cambridge was focused on evaluating an entire building design project. He presented a report on outcomes of implementation of the method, critical success factor framework, for gauging successfulness of students’ design projects at the Royal College of Art.

c) Procurement & Green Building

WLC minimisation with integrated procurement vs
conventional methods (Murray et all., 2013)

Moving on to the in-between phase in the construction procedure, Alex Murray from the University College London articulated why he believed that an integrated procurement should be considered as a substantial enabler of any whole-life-cost (WLC) estimation approach. He presented the outcomes of his studies on a number of benchmarking methods for evaluating the procurement phase, namely Capex and Opex. Robin Hardy from the University of Canberra looked into procurement from another perspective: in her interpretation, procurement is not merely confined to the stage between design and construction; rather it prevails, in one way or another, during the building’s entire life cycle. There were some amazingly controversial citations in her presentation such as “Sustainable procurement is dependent on skills and competence of the staff rather than established universal routines”; or “Even though procurement is an important stage, it may quite often be a barrier to sustainability”!

This was not the only occasion where the key to a genuine sustainable building practice was traced back to sustainable procurement (also termed as green procurement). Robert Crawford, from the University of Melbourne talked about environmental impacts of the construction supply chain. He put forward an alleged set of tiers of supply chain among which the highest amount of direct energy consumption was asserted to be associated with onsite construction activities. Manufacturing of structural elements, concrete, ceramic, and metal and wood building elements exhibit the biggest potentials for energy optimizing according to Crawford.

In a broader context, Scott Kelting (California Polytechnic State University) notified how global decision-making procedures influenced ubiquity and efficiency of green buildings. His studies encompassed key influences, central visions, and guidelines for green building around the world. A major global challenge is maintaining a satisfactory balance between functionality and environmental friendliness, according to him. Limits to mitigating negative impacts of natural light such as glare and heat is an example. Joseph Lai from Hong Kong Polytechnic University talked about another aspect of green building practices: mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. He provided an account of the guidelines for the FM sector in Hong Kong for reporting their CO2 emissions. In this case, reporting was limited to residential and institutional buildings and even this was implemented on a voluntary basis.

d) Building Knowledge Management

BIM Execution Plan Cube (Mitchell, 2013)

As expected, a good number of papers including mine were focused on building knowledge management. Not all of those works had been submitted to the AMIDDS track (Architectural Management and Integrated Design and Delivery Solutions); which was held during the two last days of the congress in the Plaza Hall. Lonny Simonian, for example, presented his research on challenges ahead of implementation of BIM in electrical engineering for producing prefabricated assemblies. A key factor in a more widespread use of such models was more suitability of such models for contractors and more willingness of the owners, he contended. The finding seems to also prevail in other domains of the industry.

Among the papers included in the AMIDDS track, David Mitchell talked about the requirements for a successful 5D BIM practice and emphasized the roe of early implementation of BIM in a design-driven approach. In his second presentation in the form of an exploratory dialogue together with Scott Lambert, Mitchel accentuated advantages of effective involvement of subcontractors in the construction procedure in an appealing. Many things should be made clear in the kick-off meeting of the project including terminology, tools that people use, and how to share savings realized by using BIM, in their opinion.

Will BIM technology be also profitable for small enterprises? This is in fact a very frequent question among AEC practitioners. Matthijs Prins from Delft University of Technology shed some light on this topic. Declaring the fact that 60% of the architectural firms in the Netherlands consist of one or two people, he explained the results of their research on implementation of BIM at small architectural firms. They had based their survey on a level-0-to-4 scale for implementation of BIM. Those who had accomplished more than four projects in BIM were considered as experienced cases. He concluded that the usefulness of BIM for small architectural firms was actually not as low as it was quite often perceived.

Iva Kovacic from Vienna University of Technology also pointed out that construction is an SME-dominated industry with 95 % of firms being constituted of up to five employees. She criticized insufficient education time for AEC practitioners (a two-hour-per-year average education time), expensive software licenses, expensive skilled BIM staff, lack of standards for BIM-oriented planning (in Austria), fees being set for linear processes rather than collaborative methods, and multifarious applications at use. According to her results, there is still extensive need for face-to-face contacts among team members despite all technological progresses.

Information in the Mirror World, with services
for the Real World (Tarandi, 2013)

Tarja Mäkelänien from VTT emphasized the importance of roles such as BIM champion and the need for re-engineering processes for getting the most out of BIM. Geoffrey Booth from Texas A&M University described their sustainable real estate development practice using quadruple net value analysis and BIM. Väino Tarandi (my advisor) introduced the proof-of-concept system for a sustainable urban collaboration hub (SUCH) developed at BIM Collaboration Lab. The system envisions a holistic trans-sectorial, trans-scalar, trans-phasic, and trans-disciplinary spatial knowledge management by means of open-standard life-cycle-support data formats. This offers a wide range of desired functions such as version management and loss-free data transaction across actors and corporations, according to Tarandi.

In search of an understanding of the affordances of BIM in the construction phase, Christoph Merschbrock from the University of Agder in Norway had tapped into tacit knowledge of the practitioners. This was in fact a worthy and detailed report on how diverse capabilities of BIM technologies are met, attained, or dismissed by different AEC actors and firms. Among the multitude of the works on automated building-permit procedure, Eilif Hjelseth from the Norwegian Building Authority explained a recent Norwegian initiative, Byggnett. The paper presented by Johannes Dimyadi from the University of Auckland in New Zealand dealt more or less with the same topic. The key to a fully-automated code-compliance checking practice is developing a standard legal data exchange protocol, according to him.

e) Safety

Among numerous works on safety at construction sites, Helen Lingard from RMIT University talked about methods and indexes for measuring health and safety in construction, in general, as well as their own initiative, multi-level measurement. In another presentation, Kristina Sulankivi from VTT introduced a BIM-based automated safety-checking tool developed jointly with scholars at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The proof-of-concept tool is based on a ruleset that controls the building model for the most common safety issue i.e. falls from height. The approach can be propagated to other sources of risk, according to her. 

Millesgården

"Angel Musician" by Carl Milles

Indian Head

Carl Milles' hearty desire was to bring his works of art to the public realm and to bring people to his art. This is evident all around Millesgården where sculptures are all integrated elements of a whole. The united sequence of chambers of different sizes, forms, colors, and atmospheres are subtly settled in a sublime public garden delicately enriched with a plethora of heavenly figures. Columns, the beloved elements of Milles, are present allaround the garden together with other reminders of Roman art and architecture. Paintings of Carl's wife, Olga Milles are also on display at Millesgården, located in Lidingö north of Stockholm.

God's Hand

There are two major characteristics that differentiate Milles' work from his contemporary artists: firstly, they have been designed and articulated as installations to be placed in specific locations either in the garden or in the outside world. Those not installed in their intended settings, for any reason, have been assigned a new location and role in the domestic constellation of Milles' works in Millesgården. Moreover, Milles hardly believed in any virtue for originality and uniqueness of the works of art. He used to produce his works in numbers and shrewdly marketed and sold them. Some of his most well-known works have not even been made by himself. "God our Father on the Rainbow" installed in Nacka Strand, for example, was crafted by one of his pupils years after the original bronze model eventually failed to be developed into the monument for peace for the United Nations building.

The last crystal clear and sunny Saturday in Stockholm was a timely opportunity for us to make a visit to Millesgården together with a number of members of SIRAP. An informative guided tour around the garden by Katja Stemme and an exhibition of the impressionist collection, "Painters in Normandy" complemented our visit.

World Building Congress 2013

During my thirty-hour rail trip from Brisbane to Cairns, I came across more roof solar panels than any other local Australian feature. I would now prefer to associate this country first and foremost with its vibrant social atmosphere, good wine, good food, sunny days, and welcoming, friendly, and easygoing people rather than kangaroos and koalas! Yet, those exotic ibises with their iconic long curved beaks freely wandering around the city were reminders of the unique flora and fauna of the continent.  

The alluring city of Brisbane hosted this year’s World Building Congress. The event was somehow overshadowed and influenced by recent natural disasters around the world, namely floods in Queensland and New York City and earthquakes as well as the financial crisis. The most concurrent topics among the works presented were resilience, sustainability, safety and security, offsite manufacturing, integrated design and planning, and smart building knowledge management. More or less similar topics have been introduced and discussed in the first series of CIB Research Roadmaps. 

The major theme of the congress, construction and society, was brought up, emphasized, and clarified in concrete terms by the Minister for Housing and Public Works of the Queensland Government, Tim Mander. The eventual goal is to add value to buildings through – among all - innovation, PPP constructs, and whole-life cost analysis, according to him. 

The first keynote speaker, Prof. Martin Fischer from Stanford University communicated their most recent findings on how to simulate numerous possibilities of a construction project before actual construction. The answer to the question “why we come up short in projects?”, in his opinion, can be traced back to organization and prediction. Here comes a list on some other topics Professor Fischer touched on in his talk: the importance of the stage following the design phase and prior to construction, clear-cut clarification of the goals of the project, elimination of uncertainties, on-budget, on-schedule, and quality projects, staff working for the project rather than for the company, continual evaluation and redefinition of the process, manufacturing building elements based on digital models, deployment of laser scanning for post-construction determination of discrepancies, implementing Multidisciplinary Design Optimization method (MDO) for balancing carbon footprint against life cycle costs, using Space Constraint Method (SCM) for evaluating efficiency of use of construction space, and integrating subcontractors in the design team. 

During the afternoon keynote speech of the first day of the congress, Peter Verwer, head of the Property Council of Australia expressed an enthusiastic appraisal of the cities and their pioneering role in our modern societies. Urbanized and connected living areas nurture productivity, he asserted. Urbanization, IT, and globalization are three major contemporary driving forces that should be benefited for creating flourishing and evolving cities, he believed. Nonetheless, bringing the language of technology and that of business closer to each other is an essential requirement for more efficient urban services. 

Later on, during the panel discussion of the first day of the congress, a number of global challenges ahead of the building industry were put forward: 

• Still 30% of construction work is done onsite (on average). 
• Building Information Modeling is quite often comprehended as a technology that customers are reluctant to use. 
• Basic requirements and strategic guidelines for creating economic shelters and modernized settlements seem to diverge extensively. 
• Costs of building are increasing because of the higher costs of the newer technologies. This poses a serious threat to small construction firms. In the Netherlands, for example, 60% of the construction firms of today will vanish away by 2050 
• Costs of operating and maintaining public welfare equipment will double by 2040 due to increasing costs of technologies. 
• Green buildings should be replaced by resilient buildings. 

During the second day’s panel discussion, Carol Le Gall, chief executive director of the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) notified contemporary challenges in the building industry with regard to optimization of production and consumption of energy, carbon, water, and waste. She continued with a comprehensive report on CSTB’s project for analyzing real-time indoor air quality; LUM’AIR. Prof. Peter Barrett from the University of Salford concluded the session with an inspiring talk to remind a neglected matter of course: what the overall role of the entire building industry is. Research activities in the field, in his opinion, may follow educational, economic, social, or environmental concerns; but they should eventually have a holistic impact and relate to how the buildings affect people. At the same time as agents in the FM sector neglect the impacts of their possessions on the lives of the mankind and simply regard their profession as a business similar to any other profitable affair, our built environment either contributes to health hazards such as Alzheimer, anxiety, and vision problems, or nurtures healthy and thriving societies. Finally, Lyn Beazley shed some light on recent technological achievements realized in the far western Australian port of Perth and Curtain University. The initiative for transforming non-visible parts of the light into energy by using photovoltaic cells and nanotechnology is an outstanding example of their cutting-edge research projects. 

The afternoon keynote speaker of the second day, Brian Krause from Turner BIM gave a ravishing lecture on their most recent developments in the field of BIM technology seasoned with demonstrations of a software solution for BIM-enabled facility management and operations developed at the University of Columbia. He touched on a variety of topics and issues in the field of use of IT for construction including authoring BIM execution plans, evaluation of total cost of ownership (TCO), turning SketchUp into an object-based modeling tool by means of plug-ins, pushing legislative boundaries forward by submitting a 3D safety model to NYC municipality, optimizing clash detection functions of existing applications, use of barcodes for more automated maintenance routines, and promoting lean BIM processes. 

The third day’s keynote speakers, Dr. Wim Bakens and Dr. Shyam Sunder depicted, among all, the CIB’s general research roadmap. Dr. Wim Bakens clarified the necessity of a research roadmap as a glossary of agreed-upon definitions and an overall conceptual model. Contemporary construction research institutes, namely CSIRO, VTT, TNO, bre, and CSTB need to be able to demonstrate that their concerns are relevant, they have access to all members of the community, and are capable of efficient and effective knowledge exchange and  collaboration. Implementation of research in practice is also momentous which calls for a closer contact with the society, industry, and government. He then noticed the fact that there is a tipping point for the percentage of investment in construction out of GNP to secure a positive contribution to development of the society. This could be termed as the built environment’s caring capacity; a concept that is closely intertwined with decline of building and the optimal peak of new construction. He articulated his proposed remedy as, among all, implementing different types of business models for overcoming the declining market, more efficient risk management, and future-oriented, sustainable, resilient, affordable, and adaptive buildings... I will probably provide a summary of other contributions in a separate post later on. 

David Mitchell, Christoph Merschbrock, Eilif Hjelseth, and me got together in a bar in Brisbane's South Bank before the last night congress dinner