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Patrick MacLeamy: BIM, BAM, BOOM! How to Build Greener, High-Performance Buildings

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Written by HOK CEO Patrick MacLeamy, this story first appeared in Urban Land Green magazine.

With early collaboration and a platform that encourages open information sharing, a design team can provide building owners with guaranteed building performance outcomes that are not just wishful thinking, but rather modeled, tested, and verifiable as sustainable.

Today’s buildings are not good enough-not because there are not enough skilled architects and contractors, but because these professionals are operating within a fatally flawed system. In the current way of working, the developer or building owner typically signs separate contracts with the architect and the contractor. As a consequence, the two professionals do not always work together efficiently and, in fact, can have competing interests. Because designer and contractor do not always function as true partners, the quality of the delivered project-the building- can be compromised.

That sounds ominous, but I am optimistic because many in the industry are working together to transform the design and construction process. And these advances dovetail perfectly with the critical issue facing society in the 21st century-sustainable communities.

Building Smart

The architecture, engineering, and construction sectors, under the auspices of the National Institute of Building Sciences in Washington, D.C., are pioneering a new design strategy called buildingSMART, which incorporates integrated project delivery (IPD) methods that emphasize early collaboration and open information sharing among all team members. Building information modeling (BIM) is the new “software platform that enables this highly collaborative, three-dimensional way for design, construction, and facility management teams to work together. BIM gives the entire team access to a dynamic, virtual building model from the beginning of design through construction and occupancy.

Among the many advantages of buildingSMART is that it gives the team the ability to test and optimize a building’s performance during design so it can provide developers and owners with guaranteed building performance outcomes that are not just wishful thinking, but rather modeled, tested, and verifiable as sustainable.

A person would not buy a car without knowing its vital statistics, such as its gas mileage, horsepower, and maximum speed. Automobile manufacturers can tell a buyer exactly how their products work, and they can back up their claims with performance guarantees.

Unfortunately, the same is not true for buildings. While the client, who may be spending tens of millions of dollars on a construction project, can know before construction commences the building’s program, what it will look like, how much it will cost, and how long it will take to complete, designers and contractors cannot guarantee anything about its performance beyond the calculations demonstrating that it will be able to adequately resist structural forces. This means that while the industry is beginning to make important strides toward creating sustainable structures-as demonstrated by the recent proliferation of buildings certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program-the danger remains that a building considered green will not, once it is up and running, be able to meet actual performance goals for the efficient use of energy, water, and materials.

By using interdisciplinary 3-D models that immediately show the implications of each choice-be it orientation, massing, materials, or systems-for the building’s actual performance, buildingSMART allows architects, engineers, and builders to develop optimal solutions for real-life conditions.

Truly sustainable solutions that generate the most value for developers and building owners emerge from this type of integrated design. The team can spend more time collaborating early in the process to achieve an exceptional, high-performance design and less time coordinating drawings late in the process. This shift in time management has significant-and positive-financial implications for the developer and owner because the cost of making design changes escalates sharply as the project moves toward construction.

Pushing the Envelope Yet Further

I would like to take buildingSMART to an ever higher level of value with an approach I call “BIM-BAM-BOOM!” This mega acronym addresses new approaches across three basic phases of a building’s life.

The first phase is the design of the building. Taking liberty with the original term, I have changed the meaning of BIM from building information model to building investigation model. During this BIM phase, the team uses IPD and 3-D modeling, as described above, to investigate options and test performance early on in order to make wise choices.

The second phase is the construction of the building. Today’s contractors function much like master assemblers who coordinate the purchase and assembly of premanufactured building components, so I refer to this as the BAM phase, with BAM standing for the building assembly model. If the architect can partner with the contractor-building on the IPD and 3-D modeling of the BIM phase-to streamline the assembly process, the architect’s initial design and production work could have up to ten times the impact on the building’s initial construction cost that it does during the BIM phase.

The third phase is the actual occupancy of the completed building. If the 3-D model that began in BIM and progressed through BAM is turned over to the building owner, it becomes BOOM!, which stands for building owner operator model. Starting at this point, and continuing throughout the useful life of the building, the team can examine and improve every aspect of a building’s performance-from lighting to ventilation systems-with the help of the same 3-D model. Well-tuned building operations can, through savings, reap the cost of constructing the building by tenfold and the cost of design fees by a hundredfold. This approach at the same time provides a significant “boom” for the developer’s initial financial investment and to the larger, shared goal of achieving a truly sustainable society.