Model Buildings

The project was a new library in the Twin Cities area, recalls Jon Crump, a principal at the Minneapolis office of architecture firm Leo A. Daly. Architects were detailing the building’s stairs, while structural engineers designed the supportive steel structure. Both were using paper drawings and specifications.

“When the contractor was making the shop drawings for the steel stairs, he noticed that the stair stringers—beams on the sides of the stairs—were running through the steel columns,” Crump says. A change order, delay, and extra work ensued. “Had we been working in a three-dimensional development environment, we would have seen a conflict notice that everyone involved would have been able to see and review,” he says.

In the two years since that library’s stairs clashed with its columns, Crump has found the three-dimensional design environment he needed. A significant change in building industry collaboration, building information modeling (BIM), is a software-generated process that creates a three-dimensional, all-inclusive, virtual model of a construction design.

It’s a significant improvement, says Matt Jensen, a project manager at Minneapolis-based engineering firm Dunham Associates, Inc. “This gives us a model of an entire building, not floor by floor, but the whole thing, from the roof down to underground. You don’t have to try to visualize a 10-story building drawn on hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper.”

In using BIM instead of two-dimensional drawings, area construction professionals say they’re helping to usher in a new industry standard. They applaud BIM’s ability to facilitate virtual experimentation, catch design conflicts, automate some changes, reward collaboration, and even save a building owner money—all before a project breaks ground.

How BIM Works

There are many types of BIM software, though Revit, a purpose-built BIM program offered by California-based Autodesk, Inc., is among the most popular. The process depends on collecting information from everyone involved in designing a structure, and incorporating each data set into a complete, virtual model.

An architect or engineer might assemble and take charge of the finished model, but the BIM process should involve architects, engineers, design service firms, managers, contractors, and the building owner, says David Jordani, president of the Minneapolis-based Jordani Consulting Group. “Each is a stakeholder in a business model that is moving toward leveraged collaboration,” he says.