Quelly Wk 2-2: B2: Construction & BIM

Construction & BIM

Summary & Commentary

BIM software is increasingly essential for all groups in architectural (and civil) engineering, including contractors and other construction related personnel. As it stands, contractor are often left out of the design phase of a project. In my opinion this is more of a cultural decide then a physical or technology one. Contractors are not being looped in early enough in the process to make it...

worth their while to invest the time, energy, and capital, it takes to be come proficient in it. This also extends to subcontractors. I recognize that do not have much industry experience to back up my claims though.

I would tend to equate contractors joining the design flow though with how we educate students these days; but not in a way that more people should go to college. I am in fact, thinking of how we "track" students. By tracking i mean how we tend to sort students by their performance, such as "the AP students", or "the band students". This happens both on an official way in many schools, but in a societal/cultural way in others. Education research shows that the more diverse a group of learners is, the more diverse the learning is. I think there is a stereotype associated with manual laborers (like construction workers) to be uneducated males whom struggled though school, or may also be of a certain ethic/cultural background. The problem in my opinion how we encourage students to learn in school. If we continue to mix the "smart" students with the "lower students", then i think other barriers too will disappear, and interdisciplinary collaboration will prevail.

Any way...Assuming we are able to bridge this cultural gap, contractors have a lot to benefit from joining (and being invited to join) the design cycle on a greater basis. The culture would come to mean that we are no longer handing off construction documents to contractors, but that it truly is a team effort. This means that they would need training and participation when creating the models, databases, and construction documentation. Then, the model "controls" can be passed along for the contractors to accomplish some of the following; scheduling construction events and milestones, keeping track of construction and creating as-builts, managing the logistics of component purchases, delivery, and storage, potential design conflicts BEFORE they occur, create BIMs or models for building engineers, and lastly the benefit of being able to better feild engineer to problems as they occur or even before they occur.

It is also important that there is no one solution. That each construction group/firm will need to experiment to find the software and norms that serves them and their clients the best. What works for a large firm may be even detrimental to another small family-run firm.

Other possible uses of BIM for contractors would be in robotics and drones to automatically enforce safety and documentation of work. They could be integrated into the software to take regular scans for photographs and add them to the project database, perhaps creating (almost) real time 3D views and perspectives.

Comments

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Sources

Eastman, Chuck. BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers and Contractors. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.