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.