Items filtered by date: July 2010
Friday, 02 July 2010 10:24
BIM – A New Hope for our Profession.
“... it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change...”. Charles Darwin
Architects are in danger of making themselves more irrelevant by ignoring very real developments in technology, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), as the new paradigm for delivering building projects.
Our profession is at a crossroads, faced with reduced fees, increased responsibility and higher client expectations. Traditional working procedures are simply not sustainable in this environment. It is vital that we adopt a new working model that performs more efficiently, delivers more valuable information and most importantly cuts costs. As an industry, we need to intelligently address the realities of what is happening in our market, and the pressure to compete in a global economy. Simply cutting overheads, reducing fees and profit margins, without a corresponding and fundamental change in the way we work, is not feasible in the long term. Finding more effective ways of working is key to our short term survival and long term competitiveness in the global market.
Any real solution has to focus on Production of Documentation - that area of our profession that has become increasingly time consuming and is responsible for the majority of our overhead costs. While architects may want to more spend time on their areas of expertise in design, project and business management, in reality they end up spending too many hours (or vast sums of money) on laborious preparation of documentation, checking, re-checking, cross-referencing and risking costly mistakes.
BIM is a technology that directly addresses the inadequacies of current documentation systems. All the 2D drawings, schedules, and specifications normally required to communicate your design, are produced directly from this single BIM model, ensuring fully consistent and reliable building information at all times, improving the quality of documentation, eliminating errors and omissions, and significantly reducing production costs and time. BIM works the way an architect thinks, exploring design in 3D with the added benefits of being able, at any stage, to provide rendered 3D images, shadow studies or animated walkthroughs, critical and accurate analytical data information (areas, volumes, material quantities etc), all to promote a clearer understanding of ideas to clients and consultants, for better decision making and collaboration.
Architects are in danger of making themselves more irrelevant by ignoring very real developments in technology, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), as the new paradigm for delivering building projects.
Our profession is at a crossroads, faced with reduced fees, increased responsibility and higher client expectations. Traditional working procedures are simply not sustainable in this environment. It is vital that we adopt a new working model that performs more efficiently, delivers more valuable information and most importantly cuts costs. As an industry, we need to intelligently address the realities of what is happening in our market, and the pressure to compete in a global economy. Simply cutting overheads, reducing fees and profit margins, without a corresponding and fundamental change in the way we work, is not feasible in the long term. Finding more effective ways of working is key to our short term survival and long term competitiveness in the global market.
Any real solution has to focus on Production of Documentation - that area of our profession that has become increasingly time consuming and is responsible for the majority of our overhead costs. While architects may want to more spend time on their areas of expertise in design, project and business management, in reality they end up spending too many hours (or vast sums of money) on laborious preparation of documentation, checking, re-checking, cross-referencing and risking costly mistakes.
BIM is a technology that directly addresses the inadequacies of current documentation systems. All the 2D drawings, schedules, and specifications normally required to communicate your design, are produced directly from this single BIM model, ensuring fully consistent and reliable building information at all times, improving the quality of documentation, eliminating errors and omissions, and significantly reducing production costs and time. BIM works the way an architect thinks, exploring design in 3D with the added benefits of being able, at any stage, to provide rendered 3D images, shadow studies or animated walkthroughs, critical and accurate analytical data information (areas, volumes, material quantities etc), all to promote a clearer understanding of ideas to clients and consultants, for better decision making and collaboration.
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ARCDOX Blog
