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:

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.