A research effort revealing three different kinds of Building Information Modeling was presented by Carlos Nome and Ozan Ozener, Ph.D. architecture students at Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture, prior to the American Institute of Architects’ Boston convention in May 2008.
Their May 13 presentation was part of “Change the World: Harnessing BIM Technology and Integrated Project Delivery for Sustainable Design,” a series of lectures that took place before the main AIA convention May 15-17.
The genesis of the presentation took place more than a year ago, when the AIA’s Large Firm Roundtable requested proposals from universities to conduct research on BIM. The proposal from Texas A&M was led by Mark Clayton, then interim head of the Department of Architecture.
Joining him in the proposal effort were Robert Johnson, professor of architecture and holder of the Thomas A. Bullock Endowed Chair in Leadership and Innovation, and Jorge Vanegas, professor of architecture and director of the college’s Center for Housing and Urban Development.
Vanegas is now interim dean at the College of Architecture.
Nome and Ozener made their presentation in a packed room at the Boston Conference Center.
“We were pretty nervous,” Nome said. “We wanted to do a good job and make a dynamic presentation, something that would capture people’s attention. I think we accomplished that, I really think we did. A lot of people complimented us on or work and said they found it really interesting and important.”
“We rehearsed our presentation a ton of times to make sure we knew exactly what we were doing,” he said. “I think we were more prepared than we thought we were.”
“We actually had job offers right after our presentation,” he said. Nome and Ozener made the presentation after Mark Clayton, then the College of Architecture’s interim head of the Department of Architecture, was called upon to deliver another AIA lecture at the same time.
After receiving a contract for $25,000 from the Large Firm Roundtable, Texas A&M’s BIM research team worked with two focus groups: first, faculty members at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture and Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, to identify what they see happening with BIM, and second, a group of industry contacts involved with BIM to gather their experiences and expert opinions about this technology.
The researchers found three kinds of BIM taking place, which Ozener and Nome presented to the AIA audience.
First, there’s BIM-A, the A standing for accelerated.
In BIM-A, new tools are used to accelerate internal business processes. “Industry people tell us they can get accelerations of 30% by using these technologies,” said Clayton. “That means 30% less time on a project, 30% fewer man hours. That’s really a very significant difference in a business that often has profit margins of 2-4 percent. So there’s strong motivation to adopt BIM from just this BIM-A perspective,” said Clayton.
Then, the penultimate stage is BIM-B.
“In BIM-B,” said Clayton, “the BIM actually serves as a central repository for all of the project information. Using networking technology, one can share that model across the boundaries of a single firm.”
The BIM-B approach changes a firm’s business model because architects work with project personnel they didn’t work with before,
“In BIM-B, an architect can share the model with his consulting engineers, his prime contractor, and with owner representatives,” said Clayton. “Architects share data they normally don’t share. They restructure what aspects of a project they do internally, what they do externally through consultants, and they start passing information to contractors, who normally wouldn’t work with the architect at all.”
After BIM-A and BIM-B there’s a final stage called BIM-I, a revolution in the procedures of architecture firms; the “I” stands for industry wide.
“If every company used information models and could freely exchange the data, then you would get massive increases in efficiency and productivity. So the report spells out that whole kind of theory,” said Clayton.
In BIM-I, the existence of an integrated database reduces errors, and improved data sharing reduces costs of communication; the BIM-I approach involves designers, consultants, contractors, subcontractors, suppliers and facility managers and reduces meetings, redrawing, and corrections.
