AIA TAP 2008 Conference

This year, the annual AIA TAP (Technology in Architectural Practice) conference went back to being held as a pre-convention workshop to the AIA National Convention and Expo, which I wrote about last month in AECbytes Newsletter #34. Recall that the 2007 conference was held as an independent event in Washington DC towards the end of last year (see AECbytes Newsletter #31). This year’s event was entitled “Change the World: Harnessing BIM Technology and Integrated Project Delivery for Sustainable Design,” and it was supported by other AIA knowledge communities including Integrated Practice, Committee on the Environment, and the Center for Building Science and Performance. It included a broad array of sessions on BIM, integrated practice, and sustainable design across the course of two days of the conference. I tried to attend as many diverse sessions as possible, and an overview of these is captured in this issue of the AECbytes Newsletter.

A New Acronym: BIN for “Building Information Network”

This session, jointly presented by Steven Brittan and Mark Dietrick of Burt Hill, Phil Bernstein of Autodesk, and Rick Huijbregts of Cisco, introduced the concept of a “Building Information Network” or BIN as the next technology for the AEC industry following CAD, BIM, and collaborative project management. While these existing technologies are geared towards the design and construction stages of a building, BIN is focused on meeting the needs of owners and facility managers for efficient space utilization, improved productivity and security, savings on lifecycle costs, supporting new experiences and lifestyles, and environment and sustainability. Currently, BIM is being integrated with energy analysis at the design stage to create more sustainable buildings. BIN takes this much further by bringing together all the building systems and monitoring and managing the energy performance of a facility in real time throughout its lifecycle. This will lead to significant savings in operational costs, which currently account for 75% of the total lifecycle cost of a building. Cisco envisions BIN as a whole new utility that will go into a building in the future, in addition to the three basic utilities of gas, water, and electricity that go into a building now. Instead of having all the devices and systems on multiple, parallel networks, as is the case today, they would converge into the single BIN network.

It would be easy to dismiss BIN as “wishful thinking” by the world’s largest networking company looking for new avenues and industries to market its products, also taking into account that Cisco’s previous initiative for the AEC industry called “Connected Construction” (presented at the Technology for Construction 2005 conference) hasn’t really taken off. But I find the concept of a Building Information Network fascinating and think it has the potential of making the vision of “smart buildings”—that respond dynamically to their environment instead of being static—a reality. It would have helped to see the concept of BIN fleshed out in more detail in the presentation, but that wasn’t the case. The idea was born out of a project Burt Hill was designing for Cisco, but that project is on hold now, and the presenters could not divulge too many details because of a confidentiality agreement. So it was difficult to assess how far the concept of BIN had been developed and what is actually required to make it work. It would seem that BIN would also need to tie into facilities management applications, but that was not discussed. It was also not clear how Autodesk was involved, apart from the fact that Burt Hill used Revit on the project.

Since they could not talk too much about the Cisco project, the presenters from Burt Hill spent some time talking about their use of IES in conjunction with Revit on various other projects, which allows them to carry out detailed evaluations including wind, solar/shadow, thermal, lighting, airflow, and so on. In the case of one project, their detailed shading analysis actually helped to make the case for a high-rise tower as opposed to a low-rise building that had a larger footprint and caused more shadows than desirable. Also of interest was the fact that Burt Hill has taken the initiative to measure the actual building performance on its projects and compare this to the predicted building performance, and they have found that the two are very close except in those cases where the building systems are not being used as they were intended. It should be reassuring for other firms to know that the results predicted by analysis tools are accurate for the most part and can be relied upon to make critical decisions about a project.

Use of BIM and Sustainable Design in a Hospital Project

In this session, Kurt Neubek of the architectural firm, Page Southerland Page, described the new 55-acreWest Houston campus project of the Texas Children’s Hospital that his firm is working on. The project is scheduled to be completed in the year 2010, and is on a fast track to avoid the costly delays that come with the dramatic escalations of 8% to 10% in construction costs every year. The hospital’s goals specifically included the use of BIM during the design and construction phase as well as for ongoing facilities management, so they wanted a design team with BIM experience. Sustainability was also an important goal for the project, not just for LEED certification, but because it was considered by the owner as the right thing to do. 

The owner first selected the CM firm for the project which then helped in the selection of the architect. Page Southerland Page is committed to BIM, being a long-time user of ADT (now called AutoCAD Architecture) and is half way in the process of transitioning to Revit. The firm considers BIM to start all the way from the programming phase, which is done using spreadsheets and a relational database. The programmatic information is then taken to Microsoft Visio where it is used to explore spatial relationships using bubble diagrams. As the next step, this information is then used to create stacking diagrams in Excel where custom macros have been created for this purpose. The stacking diagrams are then used as the basis of the actual design conceptualization and development in Revit. In the case of the Texas Children’s Hospital project, not only did the design team use Revit Architecture, but they also urged all the main consultants to use BIM as well. This included the use of Revit Structure and Revit MEP as well as the use of AutoCAD Civil 3D for the site design. Since the entire project was modeled in Revit, the use of NavisWorks for coordination and clash detection naturally followed. At the end of the process, however, the deliverable was still conventional construction documents which were generated from the models.

With regard to sustainability, the design team used rules of thumb rather than energy modeling using performance analysis tools. Even though LEED certification was not a goal in itself, many of the LEED specifications and requirements were incorporated into the design, so when the time came to actually apply for the certification, the project was able to get many of the credits. In short, the project followed the “prescriptive” approach to sustainability and Neubek did acknowledge that they had missed out on the opportunity to do energy modeling, which may have improved the project’s energy performance even further. This highlights what may be a problem with the LEED standard going forward—that you don’t really need to do energy modeling or detailed analysis to get many of the credits. Therefore, just because a project is LEED-certified, that does not mean it has gone a long way in optimizing its energy performance—there could still be considerable scope for improvement.

Insights into Green Building Modeling from an Environmental Design Firm

This session was presented by Paul Stoller of Atelier Ten, an environmental design firm that was established in London in 1990 and has now expanded to New York and New Haven as well. It provides consulting services in the design and engineering of environmentally friendly buildings and is working on projects around the world ranging in scale from housing and primary schools to national museums and sustainability strategies for neighborhood planning. The session focused on how to incorporate energy analysis, including building energy modeling, effectively into the architectural design process. It described the different kinds of analysis in detail, including energy gains and losses, thermal comfort, daylight analysis, and airflow analysis, and listed the tools that are available for each type of analysis. The list included commonly known tools such as DOE-2, Energy Plus, Energy-10, IES, and Ecotect, as well as many more tools for specialized analysis tasks. While commercial tools have a better developed user interface than government tools such as DOE-2 and Energy Plus, the latter are still widely used by firms like Atelier as they are more transparent compared to commercial tools whose inner workings and algorithms are not visible to users.

While the field of performance analysis is amply served by a wide variety of tools, there are also some cautionary aspects that should be noted. The most important aspect of analysis is how to interpret the results. It is easy for non-specialists using the tools—particularly the commercial ones that have relatively intuitive interfaces—to get seduced by the compelling graphs and numbers that emerge from these tools, when in fact, they could be misleading. There could be errors in the input, which could cause the results to be completely inaccurate. Essentially, specialist knowledge is needed, both to provide the correct input to the tools as well as understand and interpret the results properly. Another important aspect is to determine what kind of analysis to do at what stage of the design process. So, for example, at the pre-design phase, you would look at the local climate and site layout and determine the baseline energy use, whereas in the schematic design stage, you would do more quantitative testing and analyze the major systems options. Stoller presented several examples of projects his firm had worked on, showing the use of different tools at different stages for different tasks. He also emphasized the importance of pushing the analysis closer to the initial stages of a project when the most critical decisions were made, instead of the current scenario where the analysis is mostly done in the CD phase and can only be used for optimizing the design of the mechanical and lighting systems.

The presentation also touched briefly on the relationship of BIM to energy analysis. Contrary to the popular notion that BIM makes energy analysis a snap, it turns out that BIM, in fact, does not actually help that much. This is because building geometry is only one of the inputs needed for analysis, and a relatively easy one at that, as it is completely objective. Much more effort is involved in defining the conditions and assumptions for the analysis, as those are very subjective. Also, analysis tools need the building geometry to be specified only at a certain level of detail, while BIM provides the complete detailed model, which is usually overkill for the tools. For BIM to become really useful for analysis, what is needed is for BIM tools to have filters so that the required information can be abstracted out for input to analysis tools.

It was extremely helpful to have all of these detailed insights into energy modeling, and they were especially valuable coming from a firm that specializes in this task and works on several projects every year.

Formalizing the Use of BIM into a Business Strategy

In this session, John Pocorobba and John Tobin of the A/E firm, Einhorn Yaffee Prescott (EYP) shared how the use of BIM had been formalized into a business strategy in their firm. You may already be familiar with John Tobin’s recent article in AECbytes entitled “Proto-Building: To BIM is to Build” in which he presented the current state and the likely future trajectory of BIM by looking at it as three different generations, called BIM 1.0, BIM 2.0, and BIM 3.0. While he did reference a little of his firm’s work in that article, the session presented at the TAP conference went a lot further in describing how EYP was implementing BIM, not just from a technological perspective but from a business perspective as well. Based on the various challenges it was facing with BIM such as interoperability, value versus upfront investment, the impact on fee structure, scope of services, and risk management, the firm felt the need to find a business strategy and came up with a practical one page document outlining a BIM map. This document defines four different levels of BIM that respond to different levels of expectations from the client. These levels are briefly described below.

Level 1 of BIM, the lowest level, is primarily for space management tasks. The model needs to include basis components such as walls, floors, and roof, some finishes, and the spaces along with related information such as name, occupant, department, and so on. This is the kind of the model that the GSA, for example, is currently looking for as part of its BIM initiative. Level 2 of BIM goes on to add more information to the model including detailed spaces, details of walls, floors, and roof, the complete structural system of the building, details of finishes such as moldings, and all the system information including ducts, lights, panels, and equipment. Level 3 builds on the Level 2 model by adding to it all the information needed for analysis and simulation such as the thermal properties of the components, and full details of all the systems that the building will have. And finally, at Level 4 is the complete model that contains all the fabrication information and can serve as the contract model for full-fledged collaboration and integrated practice. To see how these levels would actually work when it comes to modeling, take the case of a wall. In a Level 1 model, this would be a generic object; for Level 2, you would add material and layers to it; for Level 3, you would add thermal properties, cost, and trades information; and for Level 4, you would add the complete specifications so that it is a precise virtual representation of the actual wall.

The advantage to having a BIM map of this kind, according to EYP, is that it allows clients to understand what level of BIM service a firm is capable of providing and match it with the level of requirements they are looking for. It also allows firms to have a better understanding of the effort that it takes to create the different levels of models, compare it with the value that is being derived, and determine the level of compensation that would be appropriate as well as how it should be distributed across the different phases of a project. Needless to say, different firms will have different ways of thinking about how to structure their BIM services, but it was impressive to find a firm approaching this so systematically. Some questions did come to mind with regard to EYP’s BIM map: for example, isn’t pushing the analysis and simulation out to Level 3 a little too late in the process, as corroborated by the session on energy modeling described earlier? Can an A/E firm go all the way up to Level 4 of BIM, or would this have to be done by the contractor? Would it be helpful to draw up some correlation between the BIM levels and the different phases of a project? Hopefully, answers to such questions will emerge at some point.

Other Conference Highlights

In addition to the sessions described above, the AIA TAP conference had many additional concurrent sessions as well as several plenary sessions, including an opening keynote by Chuck Eastman who talked about the common benefits of BIM that are being achieved by firms today, as well as other benefits in the pipeline including laser scanning for capturing as-built models, user simulation, energy analysis and tracking during the operation of the building, cost tracking, and carbon tracking. In one of the lunch sessions, we learnt a little more about the Project Alliance delivery method pioneered in Australia (an overview of which was presented at the AIA Integrated Practice 2006 Conference), and how it was implemented on the landmark National Museum of Australia (NMA) project. The focus of the session was on the process of collaboration and integrated practice, rather than on the use of technology, as this was not a BIM project. In another lunch session, we were treated to a fascinating presentation on the Solar Decathlon, an annual competition in which several teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house. At the end of the first day of the conference, there was a reception to felicitate two of the authors of the recently published BIM Handbook, Chuck Eastman and Paul Teicholz. And finally, at the conclusion of the conference, this year’s winners of the BIM Awards were announced. They include Morphosis for its Wayne L. Morse US Courthouse project in Eugene, Oregon; Wong and Ouyang for its One Island East project in Hong Kong; the GSA for several of its BIM initiatives; Onuma Inc. for its BIMstorm BIM charrettes; and several schools for their BIM-related academic programs and curriculum development.

As in the previous years, the AIA TAP conference continued to be the key event and networking forum in the US for all those interested in technology in the AEC industry and one the best ways to gauge how far along we have come in the implementation of technologies such as BIM and process changes such as integrated practice. There is inevitably a certain amount of repetition, with the same questions being asked every year by attendees who are new to the event and to BIM and integrated practice. One of the ideas being floated to keep the event interesting and relevant even to those who are up to speed or ahead of the curve was to label sessions as Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced, so that the questions and discussions are more meaningful and targeted towards the experience level of those who attend them. I think this is an idea that definitely merits serious consideration, and hope the AIA TAP Committee will give it some thought as they plan next year’s event. I look forward to seeing many more examples of advanced BIM implementation and integrated practice then. It should also be interesting to see if “BIN” actually gets established as an acronym in the industry by that time!

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.