December 18, 2006

CONSTRUCTION

Trends point to high tech

PATRICIA WILLIAMS

Staff Writer

TORONTO

It’s called Building Information Modelling, or BIM for short. And it’s poised to have “a huge impact” on the design and construction industry, says architect turned consultant Brian Watkinson.

Speaking at a session at last week’s Construct Canada conference, Watkinson said BIM represents a “quantum leap forward” in applying information technology to the design, construction, maintenance and operation of buildings.

“It’s not just the next version of computer-aided design (CAD),” Watkinson, now the principal in Strategies 4 Impact Inc., told an audience of architects, contractors and owners.

Rather than creating two or three dimensional representations of a building “as you do in CAD, you actually are creating (with BIM) a rich database of information about a building,” he said.

“That can generate 2D or 3D representations while promising unprecedented tech support for coordination and integration — interference checks, for example,” Watkinson told Daily Commercial News.

“If you change a detail of the building in one view, you are actually changing the information in the database, so that any other view is automatically updated. Others on the design team access the same database, ensuring they always have the current and correct information.

Not too far down the road, contractors will price the job, not by viewing drawings or CAD files, but by accessing that same database.” “When the building has been constructed, the database can be turned over to the owners to maintain it.” Watkinson, whose firm provides strategic advice and support to the design and construction sectors, predicted that BIM will “dramatically change” the way designers work.

“Early indicators are that there will be more emphasis on design and less on producing construction documents,” said Watkinson, the former executive director of the Ontario Association of Architects.

“That, in turn, is going to lead to a shift in fee structures. In Canada, architects have traditionally assumed 50 per cent of their fee is budgeted to construction documents.”

“Studies in the United States are showing that figures are dropping, but also showing a significant increase in design fees.”

“BIM could be the key to finally solving the death spiral of ever-lower fees that has plagued the industry. BIM brings a brand new value proposition for designers to sell to their clients. For designers with good business sense, that means the opportunity to charge more.”

Watkinson was interviewed following a presentation on the top 10 trends transforming the design and construction industry.

He said BIM is “an ideal tool” for facilitating integrated design, which made the top of his list. “It will help bring the builders and other project stakeholders into the project at the outset, in a meaningful way, when the key decisions are made. And it’s coming fast.”

“The United States General Services Administration, which is more or less parallel to our Public Works and Government Services Canada, is requiring BIM on all its major projects starting in 2007.”

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