buildingSMART Summit Week - Day Three

The third day of the buildingSMART Summit week started at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. The first presentation was from Nicklas Ostergaard from the social network BIM site www.BIMByen.dk – this is based on the principles of Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn of getting people together on the web who are interested in the same subject. The site has many BIM downloads, a wiki area and a discussion forum. After one year, the site already has over 2,000 members of which 200 sign on each day.

The second presentation was from Morten Steffensen from the Danish Authorities (I had met Morten earlier at the week when we sat on the same table at the bips conference dinner). The Danish Authorities are taking BIM seriously and have published a declaration of 10 ICT demands in state construction, these include: (a) Use of a single project extranet, (b) BIM to be used in competition, (c) BIM to be used in construction, (d) Digital tendering and (e) a BIM handed over to owner for FM. These demands are for all state projects, all building projects above 3m DKK. There was discussion as to how this should be enforced. Another project discussed was an automated submission of a BIM model for part of the building regulation approval.

The afternoon's venue - a beautiful 150 year old Danish building 

Leon van Berlo from BimServer.org presented an open source BIM Server. This is partly funded by the Dutch government and industry and may be downloaded and customised for free. Leon mentioned that their nearest competitor charges €150,000 per year. IFC is used as the file format for exchange, it includes a free online BIM viewer and has a Revit plug-in that means that you don’t have to do the import/export to IFC each time you change the model.

James Harty from the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA) gave a very inspiring presentation on BIM. One case study he gave was comparing the Walt Disney Concert Hall that came in five times over budget compared with the Guggenheim Building which through the use of BIM came in 18% under budget. With the Guggenheim project they passed over the BIM at tender and this resulted in very accurate pricing with only a 1% spread across all of the submissions. At KEA they are teaching the students Revit for BIM then Sigma for quantities and then MS Project for scheduling. They then use Navisworks to look at all three through a common BIM. The aim is that the KEA graduates will become some of the BIM managers of the future.

Our time at KEA came to an end with a tour of a recent building built using BIM technologies, the Green Light House Copenhagen. This was the first carbon neutral Danish Authority building built in 2009. See Green Light House Copenhagen blog post for further information and pictures.

The panel face questions from the audience during the afternoon session

On the afternoon Patrick McLeamy chairman of buildingSMART gave a super talk. Patrick was one of the founders of buildingSMART. The focus of the talk was on the importance of BIM in facility management. Patrick stated that $1 spent in design equates to $20 in construction which then turns into $60 in life cycle operating costs. The importance of the BIM getting passed through design to construction to operation was stressed. Building Information Model to Building Assembly Model to Building Optimised Operating Model. BIM, BAM, BOOM! Patrick’s final point was that if you are going to be paid to design-build-operate a large facility for 30 years – you absolutely have to make a good job on the design and the build side of things.

The Copenhagen Museum of Arts

There was a quite memorable quote from Diderik Haug, Statsbygg, Norway to end the day, “It is much easier, quicker and cheaper to fix a clash detection in a BIM than in the concrete on site”.