ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION FROM BLUEPRINT TO BIM

Image courtesy of King + King Architects

Profiled Firm: King + King Architects
Location: Syracuse, New York

As the oldest practicing architecture firm in the state of New York and the third oldest in the nation, King + King Architects has had a long history at the forefront of design. Founded in 1868 by Archimedes Russel, the firm has amassed thousands of projects during its 150 years of practice. From the 1870s-era Crouse College at Syracuse University, to the art deco National Grid Building, and plenty of 21^st century work to keep it busy, the firm maintains its premier status through a forward-thinking outlook in architectural technology.

The firm has always been focused on serving clients well, and BIM now plays a role in that. King + King Architects has seen the software and technology advance from basic 3-D drawing to a real “intelligent design” platform. Firm principals recognized the need to first establish the vision of how BIM was being integrated into the firm, then how to keep moving forward with it. They also recognize that architects are being tasked with taking on more complexity in projects and they find that BIM allows them to manage the overall process more easily. Kirk Narburgh, AIA, ASLA, the managing partner and CEO of the firm points out, “On our projects we are looking for using three-dimensional activities in the BIM environment in everything that we do, regardless of the size or scale of the project.” In terms of collaborating, he points out, “We seek out engineers and consultants that can support us in that same endeavor, including the technology that they use and how well they can integrate with how we operate.

Firm members report finding more satisfaction with 3-D BIM processes in terms of design, sustainability, and the overall quality of a project. They cite recent examples of education projects where BIM allowed them to look at the building orientation, envelope, and sunlight patterns to reduce energy use and down size mechanical systems. They attribute such successes to using BIM on a day-to-day basis throughout the office.

DELIVERING BETTER BUILDINGS: THE RACE TO BIM

Images courtesy of Vectorworks, Inc.

Profiled Firm: Design Büro
Location: Warwickshire, United Kingdom

Founded in 1991 in Warwickshire, United Kingdom, The Design Büro is an architectural design firm that specializes in creating health and social care facilities that contribute to one’s wellbeing. The firm’s designers believe that environments play an important role in the healing process, so they work closely with the people who will use their buildings to ensure they get the features they need to meet their clinical goals. According to Neil Marshall, director at the firm, “Our designs focus on the needs of patients, their families, and the staff members who work in the facilities to provide a supportive, inspiring, and flexible environment.” Doing all this while keeping their projects sustainable, practical, and within budget has made the firm successful.

With this particular focus of the firm, it is not surprising that it primarily works on government-funded projects. So when the United Kingdom’s Cabinet announced in 2011 that all government buildings must be delivered using Building Information Modeling (BIM) by 2016, some architectural firms may have questioned their ability to meet this demand. The Design Büro, however, didn’t bat an eye. The firm recognized that upgrading its software and learning how to adopt a BIM workflow was crucial to continued success.

Taking a Leap of Faith with BIM

Before the firm jumped directly into a BIM workflow, designers tested design software with a traditional 2-D process on The Tamarind Centre in Yardley Green, Birmingham, a state-of-the-art, medium-secure mental healthcare facility. The Tamarind Centre was The Design Büro’s last major project to be completed entirely in 2-D. It won the Birmingham City Council Building Consultancy’s 2013 Built in Quality Award due to the firm’s high standard of work, excellent communication and collaboration with all parties involved, and careful attention to the requirements of the end users.

Entering the world of BIM was the next logical step for this successful firm, and its first, large-scale BIM endeavor was to design the Pathology Department building for the Ysbyty Glan Clywd Hospital in North Wales. “It was a leap of faith for us at the outset because we didn’t really know what BIM meant at that time,” Marshall says. The Pathology building has since become a landmark project for the firm. Completed in 2013, the facility houses the Microbiology, Histopathology, Cytology, and Blood Sciences departments on the ground floor, as well as staff facilities and offices on the top floor. Although serious business is completed within, the exterior of the building is refreshingly bright and vibrant. Multi-colored windows decorate the sleek facade, bringing light and warmth into the modern interior.

Close collaboration with key stakeholders was paramount to match functionality with design. The firm strived to use the full capabilities of BIM, freely exchanging information during the conceptual, design, and construction phases with specialist subcontractors throughout the workflow to help with building solutions and digital fabrication. “We were able to utilize our BIM model to have the building’s pre-cast elements made off-site,” says Marshall. “This is where we started to see the real wins for BIM in cost, speed, health and safety.”

Since this was The Design Büro’s prototype BIM project, the firm set up parallel design teams. One group worked in 2-D to create signoff materials, and the other team worked in 3-D to model the building. They recognized that they could revert to an entirely 2-D process if the BIM transition became too much to handle. However, designers picked up the intuitive workflows of the BIM software quickly and soon moved the whole project into 3-D. “We realized as the project progressed that the 3-D team was not only working faster than the 2-D team, but that they were also producing better outputs from the model to aid user signoff,” says Marshall. “We converted the 2-D team to assist the 3-D team, which ultimately delivered the project in a more efficient fashion.”

New Workflows, New Strategy

The Design Büro learned a lot from its transition to BIM, as well as from the contractor who had previous BIM experience, teaching the firm its tested protocols for extracting information from models like floor areas, linear measurements, and wall areas, as well as how to use the model for clash detection. The Design Büro subsequently implemented a new business management strategy in January 2014 that defines the workflow for staff members to follow when completing projects using 3-D with BIM. This evolution formally commits the firm to using the best practices available. “Our strategy enables the staff within the office to have a go-to guide in terms of how to put all the project and asset information, documentation, and data together, as well as how to set the model up to deliver it within the required standards,” says Marshall. “We have a central server of libraries through which we develop content, and we run everything through a quality assurance solution for BIM validation, compliance control, design review, analysis, and code checking to ensure our core content is correct.”

To further inform this strategy, the firm enlisted the help of local software specialists to train its staff in model setup and optimization. Designers also worked to improve their collaborative abilities through Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) testing. “We understood throughout the design process for the Pathology building, for example, that we needed to share our model, and the best way for us to do that with such a large design team was via IFC,” says Marshall. “We fully support the open standard and open route to BIM, so we’ve engaged with our consultants and the people in our supply chain to test how our models interact together through IFC, and we’ve proven that we can fully interact with other software platforms. We challenged the requirement for native models and delivered a successful project using IFC, alongside other designers who use different software from us resulting in true interoperability.” Marshall notes that while there are sometimes mental obstacles to surmount when interacting with unfamiliar software with collaborating parties, those issues soon disappear after they see how easy it is.

The Lightbulb Moment

All of this change, testing, and exploration meant a revamping of practices and strategies for The Design Büro, but designers overcame the challenges together. “People have a trusted way of getting their work done, and people naturally want to do it in a way that they understand,” Marshall says. “You have to take a step back and show people that there is another route to delivering that information, which might take longer in the first instance, but once you get used to it, you’ve got a model that is a single source of truth. That for us at The Design Büro was the lightbulb moment.”

The Design Büro has managed all new projects with a BIM route since January 2014, which gave the firm plenty of time in advance of the government-mandated 2016 deadline to learn, to make mistakes, and to understand its new management system for delivering information and scheduling building construction from a BIM model. “We did a thorough job on that system, and that’s enabled employees to jump onto new projects and have a good resource to help them move forward with speed and efficiency,” says Marshall.