Project Development and Architectural Concepts

Construction education needs to respond to the increasing need for transdisciplinary collaboration in the AECO industry. To realize this, a wide range of new programs and courses have recently been developed at schools of building and construction as well as architectural schools throughout the world. Project Development and Architectural Concepts is one of the courses provided by the 'Division of Project Communication' as an elective component of the first year of the master program 'Real Estate and Construction Management' for this purpose.

This morning, I conducted an introductory session for the students enrolled in the course where the most fundamental concepts, the upcoming lectures and activities, course assessment criteria and other practicalities were briefly communicated. As the very first practical step towards a closer collaboration with architects, we - as the prospective project managers - met professor Jonas Runberger at the School of Architecture of KTH in the afternoon session. The concise yet overarching and inspiring lecture by Jonas on historical and contemporary practices of architectural concept development and design profession was followed by a tour around the school and a visit to the library. Below, you can see some shots from our visit to studios, workshops, the Digital Fabrication Lab and other education facilities of the School of Architecture:

A Building Products Procurement Platform

A while ago, a multi-disciplinary project was initiated at our collaboration lab by scholars from three departments of the School of Architecture and Built Environment (ABE) at KTH: Real Estate and Construction Management, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Urban Planning and Environment.

This work provides the basis for developing a building products procurement platform for environmental evaluation of design alternatives. The outcome is a ground for implementing existing tools and standards for lifecycle assessment or environmental certification of buildings in the early building design stage.

To realize this, the first phase of the Life-cycle-support Building product Indexing Platform (Lcs-BIP) project was accomplished for a specific use case, procurement, and the corresponding work-flow scheme was depicted. The federated solution introduced for environmental evaluation of design alternatives is composed of prototypes of a web-based tool for procurement of building products and materials (BuildX), coupled with a BIM-enabled platform and data sharing hub (Share-A-space). The system assists users to maintain a trifold focus on competitive price, quality, and environmental performance of the building. The overall workflow of the system was clarified through an exemplar scenario with the three disciplinary roles of an architect, a BIM administrator and a contractor.

I will present the outcomes as a poster (see below) next week at the World SB14 Barcelona Conference. This exemplar approach could be complemented with high-end solutions for BIM-based product libraries so as to provide the design and construction team with maximum flexibility and required knowledge for balancing environmental, economical and functional measures in their proposed design alternatives.

The Venice Biennale of Architecture

A work collaboratively created by architectural schools around the world exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale. It was estimated to have taken 40,000 hours to complete (source).

Spatial arrangements and architectural design can not be ignored in any large-scale event. Yet, it took the Venice Biennale around a century after its initiation in 1893 to devote an independent section to architectural works. This happened when the Biennale was - for the first time - set up by an architect, Paolo Portoghesi.

Since then, there has been a great deal of discussion around the purpose and directions of Venice Biennale of Architecture. The architectural historian and critic and one of the contributors to the architectural exhibition of the latest Biennal, Léa-Catherine Szacka, brought up this topic last Thursday at the School of Architecture of KTH.

The central theme of the lecture was the role of architectural exhibitions. It is still not clear neither to the organizers nor to the attendants if such venues primarily target architects or public as their audience, if they are supposed to embrace and communicate representations of existing architecture or envision and inspire future works in metaphorical and abstract forms, or whether they are just simply a place for meeting and networking with great names in the career as special guests. Even those who seem to agree on representation of architectural works as the main function of architectural exhibitions, have divided opinions on whether it is the final product that should be exhibited or the process of conceptalization, development and realization of architectural works.

Since its inception in 1980, the Venice Biennale of Architecture has had its all sorts of twists and turns. In 2006, for instance, the exhibition directed by Richard Burdett turned its back to all the elaborate, the spectacular and the glorious and sharpened its focus on cities and experimental aspects of urban design.

This year's directors, Rem Koolhaas and The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) decided to dedicate the entire exhibition to collaborative research on architecture. Also, an effort was made to redefine the relation between the serving and served spaces by mixing the two together. Restaurants, performance halls and dance floors were integrated with galleries and pavilions and a broader variety of artistic works was provided to bring people from different social classes together.

All other events at the Venice Biennale are fairly clear about their mission for accommodating works of contemporary art. The encompassing structures and pavilions also vividly feature articulated designs themselves and strive to communicate own messages to visitors. While the identity of the works exhibited at the event for architecture is still alternating original installations conceived and realized independently and second-hand narratives of reputed architectural works.

BIM-Forum

The concluding talk by Prof. Thomas Kalbro

Department of Real Estatae and Construction Management of KTH had its two-day kick-off gathering after the summer on Thursday and Friday last week. The sessions were composed of reports and group discussions on the two main themes of research and education as well as current and expected performance of the department and emerging fields in research and education. The venue was Djurönäset which is located in the far west of Stockholm's archipelago and almost at the verge of Baltic Sea. This was a timely opportunity for exchange of experience and knowledge in a relaxed environment, socializing with others at the department and breeding grounds for more collaboration and synergy in the coming year.

Division wise meeting of Project Communication; right to left:
Hannes Lindblad, Tina Karrbom Gustavsson and Prof. Väino Tarandi

The main motivation for this post is, however, presenting a delayed report on BIM-Forum organized by Cad-Q last May. The event was a thorough complement to an earlier seminar by Cad-Q elaborating on BIM 360 Glue and BIM 360 Field. The seminar was opened by a role play that simulated the building information flow through a complete reconstruction/addition process from the initial requirements management phase to operation. Participants in the demonstration represented different roles in a reconstruction/addition project e.g. the owner and the architect.

The role play simulating the building information flow
through a complete reconstruction/addition process

The point of departure was submitting a request by the owner for access to the drawings of the site and the existing facilities on the site. Currently, drawings are mostly in DWG or raster formats and deposited in digital archives of the FM firms such as HyperDoc. Interaxo (previously projektnavet) is Cad-Q's new web-based solution for archiving building drawings and models in more intelligent formats; while another product, BIMeye, serves as a requirements repository. BIMeye is composed of a variety of modules such as Door Manager, Room Manager, Audit Trail, etc. A useful functionality in this application - which is also available in other requirements management software such as dRofus - is creation and re-use of semi-standard room types. Customization of existing room types, classification of requirements according to different disciplines and export to popular formats such as Excel are some other functionalities of BIMeye.

The architect then opens the model in his/her BIM authoring software, in this example Revit, and uses the mass-modelling tool to create room objects based on the requirements imported from BIMeye. The newly planned or modified parts and elements of the building are modelled within Revit and exported as IFC through Naviate functionalities. Room objects and other essential parts could, in turn, be imported to MEP applications. Further disciplinary requirements such as heat transfer, glow and light intensity are then imported from BIMeye and added to corresponding building elements. Components are modified when required so as to fulfill the new requirements. The outcome is channeled back to other actors as the base for further development and the design is incrementally formed by all disciplinary actors in an iterative manner.

The BIM coordinator deploys Navite to guarantee that correct information is included in the exported IFC models. Simplebim - which operates in the background of Naviate - also controls for compliance with a host of measures such as availability of required information for energy, ingress and igress analysis, accessibility and other Swedish building codes. Similar to Solibri Model Checker, the results could be reported in a multitude of formats such as PDF, PPT and BCF (BIM Collaboration Format). The BCF file is then sent to relevant actors via email, project's repository or Naviate BCF Manager. New BCF files could be consecutively created and shared.

When the design is finalised, detailed information on new rooms such as wall and floor finishes are registered by BIMeye in the form of searchable Room Data Sheets (RDS) including intelligent fields for different parameters. BIMeye also enables synchronising RDS's with the BIM model and querying the database based on desired values for specific parameters.

In the second session, I participated in the facility management track due to my research interests. The three other tracks were for architects, structural engineers and MEP engineers. Anne Ellingbö provided a brief introduction on Interaxio and its functionalities namely archiving drawings, revision management and administrating the approval procedure. This file repository is in principle comprised of a folder structure. A specific type of folder, called "smart folder", provides some advanced possibilities such as facilitated grouping of files, batch property assignment to files, export to Excel sheets, etc.

The next speaker was Anders Moberg, manager of CAD Quality AB. He briefly presented the latest advances in implementation of BIM for facility management and the state-of-the-art of deploying new tools and technologies for propelling the sector through the consecutive stages of BIM-maturity. Moberg mentioned a number of initiatives throughout Sweden for converting legacy drawings of existing buildings to object-based models and complementing them with techniques such as laser scanning. Projects by Region Skåne, Locum, Fortifikationsverket, Riksdagsförvaltningen and Falu Kommun were among the examples mentioned by Moberg.

The final presentation was an introduction of the new version of HyperDoc. Security measures for acess of different groups of users, versioning at the object and field level, customized views to the central object-based model and the possibility for importing IFC and fi2 files were some of the new features introduced. Even though the FM&O sector has traditionally been lagging behind other actors in the building industry in embracing new information technologies, recent political ambitions and technological advances demonstrate signs of accelerating the progress in the field. Lack of universal standards and mismatch among current FM&O workflow procedures and the ones required for a BIM-based practice are two main obstacles on the way to be tackled.

CIB Facilities Management Conference

Copenhagen Town Hall

Per Anker Jensen at the welcome reception

It was a delight to talk to Professor Per Anker Jensen in the Town Hall of Trondheim last summer and hear about their Centre for Facilities Management (CFM) at DTU. I was there for presenting my work on life cycle support information systems in the 7th Nordic Conference on Construction Economics and Organization. I did however not have the faintest idea that I will submit my next working paper to the CIB FM Conference and meet Per again in the Town Hall of Copenhagen a year later. The CIB Facilities Management Conference was organised by the CIB Working Commission W070 (Facilities Management) in collaboration with W111 (Usability) and W118 (Clients and Users) at Technical University of Denmark in the dreamy city of Copenhagen 21st to 23rd May.

Søren Salomo, head of department of DTU Management Engineering, welcomed the audience to the conference. He briefly adressed the central theme of the conference, "using facilities in an open world and creating value for all stakeholders" as wel as related challenges including energy efficiency and new materials. Professor Danny Then (representing W070) explained how challenges such as the need for provision of social housing and efficient resource management bear on FM research and practice. He also clarified how asset management and maintenance have recently been more closely linked to other areas such as workplace design and Building Information Modelling (BIM). This was followed by Professor Geir Hansen's speech about W111 and Dr. Kim Haugbølle's presentation on the role of users and clients and the urge for a closer collaboration and mutual understanding among various actors within the sector.

The very first keynote speaker of the first day was Jacob Steen Møller, director of facilities of DTU Campus Service. He provided a brief history of the previous and current campus buildings of DTU and as well as the structure, business model and business strategy of the FM organization. The business model of the FM section is basically outlined by the university's overall business goals and missions. In contrast to the initial designer-centric top-down layout of the campus area, current strategic plan of DTU facilities is mainly derived from the needs of the users and therefore allows a more flexible planning and a broader variety of architectural styles and construction materials.

The overall goal of the plan is to fulfill the requirements of co-locating, growth and efficiency; while the main principles of the contemporary planning strategy of DTU are as followed:

• Maintaining the initial axial structure
• Hierarchical order of outer and inner spaces for a clearer sense of location
• Park and landscape (the campus is considered as the edge of the woods)
• More free forms in the design of buildings and facades
• Car, bike and prospective light rail traffic

Campus area of The Technical University of Denmark (Source)

In line with the central theme of the conference, Jacob notified the importance of educating users and clients about the construction procedure, the briefing phase and when and how they can influence the process, opening up the spaces around the campus and letting different user groups from the society to use them, make facilities and information on facilities available for research, developing business cases for leasing, involving students and professors in design and operation, and integrating FM into value creation strategies.

The first speaker of the first track (FM performance and industry maturity) was Sarel Lavy from Texas A&M University who contemplated on key performance indicators, the relation among the organizational goals and the facility goals and critical success factors. The major categories of benchmarking indexes, according to him, are financial, physical, functional and survey-based. In the following presentation, Professor Danny Then introduced his proposal for measuring FM maturity across organizations via an integrated feeder factors framework.

Then, Tuuli Jylhä from Aalto University presented an intriguing study on how unplanned activities (so called "making-do" activities) precipitated by insufficient or missing information impede value creation in FM organizations. It is nevertheless always a tricky job to maintain the balance between timely decision-making and waiting for complete information.

In the afternoon session (Track 4: Clients and users), Pieter Eisma from TU Delft presented a literature review on public clients in construction. Together with Leentje Volker, they had queried Scopus and JSTORE databases and through qualitative and quantitative analyses concluded that the majority of issues were associated with organizing and setting up the project. Rikke Brinkø reviewed some theoretical and practical grounds of sharing spaces and Mohammad Mayouf talked about incorporating BIM into facilities management.

A number of useful tips on how to get published were provided by Emma Steele, Sarel Lavy and Joseph Lai from the journal Facilities. Choosing topics of importance, focusing on areas with little existing knowledge, basing papers on rigorous research work, use of evidences, objectivity and the importance of the keywords were some of their hints.

Nyhavn, Copenhagen

Liselotte Panduro from the Danish Facilities Management Association (DFM) opened the second day with introducing their organization with 150 members including real estate companies and providers. She then addressed the ten top FM trends articulated by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), which could be shortlisted as sustainability, complex building systems, aging building stock, business continuity, information management, attracting top talents, improving the recognition of the profession, strategic thinking, contributing to the well being of the society and changing work styles.

The keynote speaker of the second day, Juriaan van Meel from CFM, contemplated on the challenges ahead of and the possibilities envisioned by living in an open world. In practice, gated communities and secured spaces still do exist. The risks of working at open and shared spaces such as cafes in comparison to the closed and fully managed offices are, nevertheless, being gradually outweighed by their benefits. Flexibility with time and location, lower costs and cozy milieus are some examples. Juriaan then introduced the concept of "cowork spaces" which implies a spatial and temporal superimposition of office spaces and public spaces. Contemporary cowork spaces are, in essence, grounded on sharing both spaces and values. Cowork spaces are, however, still marginal and more popular among hipsters and IT savvy entrepreneurs.

I was the first speaker of the practice track one "invited speakers and case studies" which was a joint session together with representatives from the industry chaired by Poul Henrik Due, the chief advisor at Grontmij. The idea of this work was incepted last year when Johannes Dimyadi approached me after my presentation at CIB2013 in Brisbane and briefly explained the development process and architecture of the BIM-integrated information management system that he and his colleagues had designed and implemented in two campus areas of Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. I found it an appropriate case for my research and during the ensuing year, we were constantly in contact from the two opposite sides of the planet. In a nutshell, our paper takes Unitec's FM system as a purposive-sampling case and reports on how a number of technical issues prevailing in other BIM-based FM systems have been dealt with in this example.

Statistics by Signal Architects showing
underused educational spaces

The second speaker, Per Feldthaus from Signal Architects, presented their performance-based approach to design of interior spaces. Performance matrices provide designers with statistical analytic tools to reconfigure spatial layouts of workplaces and optimize the firms' use of space. The research presented by Marit Støre was a study for benchmarking FM departments of a number of hospitals in Nordic countries. Data on logistics, cleaning, catering and other FM services had been collected with the aim of quantitatively outlining the perception of a "best practice" in FM using the Balance Score Card methodology. The overall aim of such studies is to investigate how to adjust FM strategies to be better aligned with the core strategies of the firms. The results show that there is no strong corelation among FM competences and FM services of firms. Swedish hospitals possess higher FM competency than their Danish and Norwegian counterparts. Swedish hospitals also have the highest amount of outsourcing FM services.

Siri Blakstad from Reinertsen presented her study on workplace management. Flexibility for better compliance with the fast pace of development of new technologies, reducing operational costs and area efficiency were the major themes of her presentation. She also addressed the required qualifications associated with different operational roles in FM firms: strategic understanding for the top management, timely and informed decision making for the operational staff and the optimum ways of working for the staff.

The first speaker of the afternoon session of the second day was Søren S. Prahl from Novozymes. An interesting part of Søren's presentation was the risk assessment tables that they had developed for clients demonstrating - both in numbers and colors - the estimated costliness of different decisions for maintenance or replacement of equipment and spaces. He also elaborated on the three major categories of FM goals (strategic, tactical and operational) and various features of a successful FM practice such as the importance of personal competencies and leadership and communication skills. 

Conference dinner at SSI; left to right: Frédéric Bougrain,
Tuuli Jylhä, me, Marleen Hermans and Manish Dixit

Poul Henrik Due outlined his proposal for FM screening logs to be implemented at early stages of feasibility and briefing of construction projects. The core idea is to inform the client about the FM consequences of each design alternative based on in-depth analyses and earlier experiences. The "logs" will be maintained, completed and retrieved for the purpose of quality insurance and benchmarking during the consecutive stages. Michael Zobl from the Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien) reported the outcomes of their research survey on 500 firms using the Mixed Method Approach (qualitative and quantitative). According to the results, there is no correlation among outsourcing facility services (or more accurately increasing the number of the external service providers) and reducing the costs. Outsourcing may reduce the costs of the firm, but at the same time, increases the risks. The authors conclude that there is a tendency to overestimate the advantages of outsourcing.

The second day of the conference was wrapped up with an inspiring visit to the new headquarter building of ISS, the prominent facility services company where Caspar Isager Hansen, the PMO Manager, explained their services and the location procedure from their old building. His talk was followed by a guided tour around the building and the joint conference dinner.

Workstations layout at ISS headquarters

In the first research track of the third day, Christopher Heywood from the University of Melbourne described a case of relocation of educational facilities. The focus of the study was on the psycho-social factors that impact individual users' experiences during the relocation process. Data were collected through interviews, diaries and observation. The findings show that the way different people experience relocation is not homogeneous rather it is individual and in principle different from one person to another.

Sari Tähtinen from Aalto University presented a study on user experiences of a creative class district in Helsinki using the 6T model. According to the 6T model, tune, tempo, task, ties, tales and theme are the six major factors that shape the experience of a place for the user.

The research track 10 (FM innovation and technology) was opened with a presentation by Nils Olsson from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on the use of Big Data for evaluation of buildings. Big Data is defined as a huge amount of data that can not be analyzed by traditional database tools. Volume, velocity and variety are the features that differentiate Big Data from normal data. Availability, applicability, relevance and privacy are some of challenges ahead of implementing Big Data more ubiquitously.

Giulia Nardelli from DTU provided an overview of the tools for including stakeholders in FM service design. In this approach, clients, customers and end users are also considered as co-creators and resources for innovation in the FM firm. Stakeholders could be involved in a variety of traditional and ICT-based as well as direct and indirect ways. It is recommended to accurately plan stakeholder participation in the areas of strategic decision making. The very last presentation was given by Poul Ebbesen from DTU about implementation of Information Technology in facilities management. I met Poul in March during the bSI conference in Stockholm for the first time. While my studies are focused on implementing object-oriented technologies and database management systems in FM, long experience in the FM sector has provided him a broader insight to see the full picture. He is therefore determined not to limit himself to any of the pertaining epistemological fields of innovation management, organizational theories, implementation or socio-technical theories; rather to focus on value creation and to embrace a variety of conceptual frameworks in pursuit of a more realistic solution.

Finally, during the closing session, Professor Keith Jones from Anglia Ruskin University presented his report on prevailing and emerging subject areas in the field of facilities management and usability derived from a Delphi survey before Per Anker Jensen made the final remarks. As evidenced in the majority of the works presented, the importance of scientific facilities management has recently gained greater recognition and the shift from a practice-based profession overwhelmed with short-term strategies and ad-hoc solutions to a fully coordinated discipline is gaining momentum.

BIM 360 Glue/Field

It was towards the end of March when I attended a seminar about Autodesk's recent flagship products, BIM 360 Glue and BIM 360 Field. This event was arranged by the Scandinavian provider of modelling and drawing software, Cad-Q, at their headquarters in Stockholm. In principle, these two product are an effort for promoting a cloud-based building information storage and management. BIM 360 Glue is in principle developed as a design tool, while BIM 360 Field will be used in the construction site.

BIM 360 Glue is aimed to be integrated to the Revit/Navisworks workflow and manage multidisciplinary model coordination, clash/conflict control and communication via web applications, tablets and smart phones. Coordination issues can be marked and reported via email. By running the software on tablets, it would be possible to benefit from the immersive capacity of the package, physically navigating around the space and measuring distances for controlling clearances. The clash detection function is however not active on tablets. BIM Glue seems to have maintained a strong focus on issue management based on specific templates for different types of issues (issues related to quality, security, constructability etc.) and a centralized web-based issue repository. Issues are attached to and handled at the object's level. BIM Glue strives to integrate the information repository, the model-checking tool and the communication environment into the design software all provided in-house at the convenience of Autodesk customers. It is possible to import and merge models in a variety of formats (dwg, dxf, ifc etc).

BIM 360 Field is actually a data management system for construction sights with in-built functionalities for commissioning and hand over. BIM Field allows importing varous types of building information from a variety of databases and applications such as MSProject. Inspection checklists and legal documents can be imported and integrated to BIM Field. Both BIM Glue and BIM Field can be synchronized with Navisworks Manage.

What seems to be still missing is an automated link for infomation transfer between Glue and Field. Apparently, information should be imported from Glue to Field (say from the design database to the construction database) almost manually. This glitch is in fact not specific to Autodesk's flagship products rather should be attributed to the fragmentation and shortsightedness still prevailing in the construction industry which is naturally also reflected in their tools, workflows and information management routines.

Miscellaneous Diary

Time flies and my posts become more sporadic. Having some hours to spend at Helsinki Airport on my way back from a short trip to Budapest, it is perhaps the right time for writing a summarized retrospective diary comprising the highlights since I wrote about Stockholm Student Fair:

On 7th February, I made a visit to the conceptual exhibition, Light Houses, at the Museum of Architecture in Stockholm. Thirty two young architectural firms from Sweden, Norway and Finland presented their ideologies and methodologies through "objects" and "words". Works were ranging from utterly abstract and conceptual ones to building models and even a book of technical drawings. My favorites were the works by the Finnish firm, Lundén Wikar Österlund and the Mirror Cube by the Swedish firm, Tham & Videgård.

In the afternoon of the 9th February, I joined the introduction ceremony for foreign students in Sweden held at the City Hall. The event was opened by Margareta Björk, the chair of Stockholm Municipality. Then, it was time for talks by the head of education, the CEO of Stockholm Business Region Development, director of Staf (Maria Fogelström) and the vice president of SSCO (the central student union organization in Stockholm). Maria left a 2-minute portion of Staf's time to me for introducing our NGO, SIRAP, and its activities.

This is now a while that I have been participating in information management meetings of a construction project for building an educational facility in the campus which is located just a hundred meters from my office. This exquisite building is designed by the Danish architectural firm, Cco, and is a unique project from different aspects: the building itself is a study object by making parts of its structural, mechanical and electrical components visible to the users; it accommodates flexible education and exhibition spaces with an interior layout that allows quick shift between different education modes. The building will be ready for use by 2016.

Something even more important about this project for us at the Division for Project Communication is that we will be able to use all digital models of the building for educational and research activities. In order to get updated about information management and digital modelling status of the project, I will be participating in two categories of the meetings: BIM-coordination sessions and BIM-development session. On 11th February, the very first occasions of the two meetings were held, BIM-representatives of all participating firms as well as the participants from KTH research group were introduced to eachother, and the overall principles of information management for the project were announced by the BIM-consultant firm, Plan B. In the following BIM-coordination meetings on 25th February and 11th March, more details about modelling routines, information sharing and exchange formats were discussed.

Lunch seminars are part of a share-and-discussion tradition at the Department for Real Estate and Construction Management. On 12th February, Prof. Hans Lind presented his new book together with Prof. Thomas Kalbro and Prof. Göran Cars, "New regulations for increased residential construction and better infrastructure". The book is mainly a critical overview of prevailing planning autonomy of municipalities in Sweden which, in the absence of efficient and sufficient motivations and incentives, has resulted in an increasing gap between the supply and demand of residential buildings is Sweden. Authors also propose new legislative approaches with a stronger role for both the central government (forcing municipalities to plan) and also a stronger role for the developers when it concerns the details of the plans and buildings as a remedy for this problem.

14th February, I had an stimulating conversation with Sara Eriksson, planner at KTH, as part of an ongoing study on requirement management. It was amazing to hear about the way the client (here Akademiska Hus) and the prospective tenant (KTH) collaborate in jointly providing the consultants with descriptions, criteria and measures of the building they will operate and use.

During the previous session of a series of discussions on qualitative methods at our department, I shared my recent experiences from a paper submission with others on 17th February. First, I went through different sections of my work (now submitted to CIB W070, W111 & W11 in Copenhagen) and asked the audience about their opinions on the overall layout and structure of the paper. Then, we discussed the comments I had received from the reviewers and how things could be enhanced prior to the final submission.

My afterwork session in the evening of the 28th February was a talk on intercultural communication and Swedish culture organized by us at SIRAP and given by Karin Knutsson. The talk was followed by a broad contribution and challenging questions from the audience mostly trying to better comprehend complicated social codes and norms of the Swedish society.

On 28th February, after months of correspondence and constructive discussions with the co-author, Johannes Dimyadi, I finally submitted the final version of our paper to the CIB conference for facility management. Our work is an analytic description of a progressive example of implementation of BIM-based applications for administering FM&O activities. The project was executed in Auckland (new Zealand) for a campus area. Johannes is the system architect of the BIM-FM solution.

On Sunday 2nd March, I watched "Wolf of Wall Street" which I did honestly not find as splendid as I had heard it to be. There is no doubt that the acts were great and the extravagant and flashy scenes were compelling; but it was really difficult to believe that the movie served in the first place an edifying purpose and was actually not a glorification and celebration of power, wealth and American life as common to the mainstream of cinema in the US.

On 4th and 5th March, our department hosted a Ph.D. workshop with participants (both Ph.D. students and supervisors) from the Swedish universities of Chalmers, Lund and Luleå. Discussions on theories, methodologies and research structure raised during the workshop were greatly instructive and informative.

From 12th to 14th March, I attended an intensive training course on "Enhanced Personal Leadership & Effectiveness" in Norrtälje (North of Stockholm). Other than useful lectures and experiments on presentation skills, advocacy and enquiry techniques, inter-cultural communication, etc. the course was a timely opportunity for self-reflection and self-evaluation. The course was organized by departments of transport and computer science of KTH.

During the last week, a lot happened here in Stockholm in the subject area of standardization of information modelling and management of the built environment. The plenary sessions of the buildingSMART week were held at Stockholm City Conference Center and KTH main campus 17th to 19th March bringing together the world's highest-level experts from academia, industry and national and international organizations. The main conference session was held on 20th March. This was in fact the very first international presence of the newly-born BIM Alliance Sweden. I will hopefully write more about this event in a separate post soon.

Stockholm Student Housing Fair 2017

The physical model of the planned developments located
at KTH huset 

Last week, I dropped by an exhibition of the proposals for the detailed project plans of the new student housing areas at KTH main campus. I could have in fact not skipped it, firstly because the plan was about the development in the immediate vicinity of where my workplace is located; and secondly, since the exhibition was being held at the Administrative building (KTH huset) which is less than fifty meters away from my office!

Proposals had been procured by the City Planning Office of Stockholm (Stadsbyggnadskontoret). When accomplished, the buildings will accommodate around 630 student apartments and administrative rooms with a total surface area (GFA) of 13250 sq.m. Representatives from SBK, the client (Akademiska Hus), and the consulting firms who had developed the suggestions namely Utopia Architects and 2BK Architects were present to provide information to visitors.

This is in fact part of a larger plan for creating a more lively and attractive atmosphere in the campus and, at the same time, meeting the ever-increasing demand for student accommodation in Stockholm. The construction phase of the currently-presented plans will not start before 2016; though some other buildings of high architectural merits within the same initiative, such as the new School of Architecture and the Teaching House (Undervisningshuset) are already under construction.

The proposal by Utopia Architects for student housing
at KTH main Campus 

Utopia Architects' proposal for student accommodation alongside Drottning Kristinas street (just next to our building) consists of two building blocks in nine and five stories and slanted roofs. In contrast with the majority of red-brick façades typical to KTH main campus, these two buildings are suggested to be covered with corrugated cladding sheets in golden and silvery tones on both façades and rooftops. The same wavy pattern of the sheets is also extended to façades of the ground floor where concrete and wood are predominant materials. The apartments will comprise of two 25-sq.m. and 40-sq.m. types. The ground floor will accommodate public spaces and study rooms. The two new buildings together with ours (L-building) will almost fully encompass the currently semi-detached green area and create a warmer and cozier court-yard atmosphere in it.

Utopia has also suggested a setting made up of two student residence buildings with ten and six stories to be placed between Teknikringen and the Red Cross park. The façades are clad in a grayish ochre brick and the roofs are steeply pitched. The buildings will accommodate around 140 apartments ranging from 20 to 25 sq.m. as well as common rooms.

The proposal by Archus for student housing 

Archus Architects's proposal is composed of three tower blocks for student residences. The uniformity of the entire complex is maintained by devising openings of the same size in all brick facades; while window frames are carved in different forms. Altogether, around 135 apartments with a surface area of 23 to 30 sq.m. each will be located in the three buildings.

The forth part of the planned developments presented at the exhibition was an assembly of 270 apartments in two buildings of five and six storeys, called "The Rocks". The proposal is developed by Semrén & Månsson Architects and resembles a lump of rock. The façades are made up of concrete elements with delicate nuances of color. The slope of the roofs towards south-west facilitates installation of solar panels.

Student housing projects at KTH Campus are part of a broader project, "Student Housing Fair 2017" (Studentbostadsmässan 2017). The goal is to overcome the shortage of student housing and decrease the waiting time for new students to one semester. The objective is to produce at least 6000 new student housing units by 2017 in Stockholm County which will increase the existing stock by 50 percents. The project is considered as a contribution to Stockholm as a world class academic destination.

Source: Information leaflet distributed at the exhibition (Samrådsmötet 2014-01-30, KTH huset)

Conversation in the Cathedral

"It is the best thing that can happen to someone, Ambrosio," Santiago says."Believing in what he says, liking what he does."

Santiago is desperately looking back into his life in search of that very determining moment that ruined his entire existence and drained his being of all the meaningful and the worthwhile. He puts a devastating effort into a frame-to-frame investigation of his life through a spontaneous conversation with an old mate in order to come up with a legitimate explanation and alleviate the bitterness of his mortifying thoughts...

Recently, I had a great time reading Vargas Llosa's astonishing work, "Conversation in the Cathedral". What is perhaps of a lesser importance in his novel is Santiago's disquieting answer to his agonizing question which is revealed at the end. In the meanwhile, his mind-twisting story is progressively and cumulatively depicted and constructed through people's initially diffused and eventually converging narratives. It is actually through those numerous intertwining narratives that a myriads of apertures are opened up to Santiago's critical self-contemplation and, at the same time, social structures of power.

"It's been a long time since I've known what was proper or improper." He smiled. "Only whether it suits me or not."