BIM Now More Than Ever

Last week I attended the AGC BIM Forum at the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas, Texas. The BIM forum is a loose group of construction professionals, architects, subcontractors, and building owners that meets quarterly to discuss BIM success stories, lessons learned, and other news about integrated delivery using BIM.

 Entitled “BIM Now More Than Ever,” the agenda of presentations, case studies, breakout workgroups, and "rapid-fire technology demonstrations" was two days packed full of real world BIM results and new technology. Rather than offer ‘how to’ demonstrations – as you might find at the Bentley BE conference or Autodesk University – the BIM forum focuses instead on speakers like John Tocci, Jr., of Gilbane Building Co., talking about their latest projects and how they shared information with the whole building team. Jan Reinhardt (Adept Project Delivery), Laura Handler (Tocci Building Co.), and Sarah Vekasy (KlingStubbins) were some of the other experienced BIM hands that presented during the conference.

Because most of the sessions were focused on integrated practice and model exchange best practices, I found almost every session relevant and interesting.

In one of the more detailed presentations, Tocci described the 695,000-sf, 14-story, $259-million Maricopa County Court Tower project he is working on with Gould Evans, AECOM, and Syska Hennessy. Tocci spent four months in the offices of the Gould Evans (lead design) and AECOM (interior design) giving constructability feedback during an iterative design process for the project. Working in Revit, the team created one unified model for the massive project. Tower crane location studies were done in 3D and other constructability issues were explored in the Revit model. The entire team also used Newforma Project Center to share and track information throughout the design process, too.

The 695,000-sf, $259-million Maricopa County Court Tower in Phoenix, Ariz.

The AGC revealed the latest version of its newest contractual agreement “MEP requirements for BIM,” during the conference.

 The document defines a “Project Coordination Manager” in MEP requirements as the person who will monitor meeting minutes, resolve issues of non-compliance, and verify MEP work as planned in the model. According to the document the Project Coordination Manager” will also act as a liaison between the client, the MEP team and design team. Much of the responsibilities of the MEP coordinator follow the traditional role of the general contractor on a project.