Chapter 4 - BIM for Owners and Facility Managers (Week 2, Group C)

BIM is traditionally a tool that is known to be used by architects and engineers in the design process but it also can be used by the owners and managers of the buildings it is used in. Many of the tools that make BIM such an attractive tool for architects likewise make sense for an owner to use. BIM can analyze the building’s energy use to improve performance, provide accurate cost estimates to reduce financial risk, coordinate scheduling by introducing a 4^th dimension of time into the building’s drawing and shorten the project, and other features that appeal to the owners of the building.

The use of BIM in the design process is at this point usually limited to the final stages of the design, and other programs are used to create preliminary drawings. However as BIM becomes more widespread the use of BIM with all parties involved in the building process will become more common, especially with the owners. BIM makes it easier for someone uninitiated with architectural drawings to understand the building. Seeing a 3D model of a building makes much more sense than a series of plans to someone who is not used to seeing plans on a day-to-day basis. In addition the use of BIM can facilitate the approval steps of the building during the design process, streamlining the construction of the building and saving on costs. What’s more BIM reduces the chance of errors and can prevent lawsuits.

Owners provide the financial backing to a project so they have the most interest in the financial aspects of the project, and as BIM saves both time and money it is worthwhile that building owners learn BIM technologies.

This chapter focused on the implications of using BIM in relation to the owners of the property. It focused on the benefits of using BIM, as would be expected from a book about BIM, but it also talked about the risks of using such software and addressed some of the disadvantages of BIM.

References

Eastman, Charles M. BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers And Contractors. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 19 Jan 2015.

Response to Jonathan Plotkin

I found it interesting how drastically the hours spent on a project by an intern architect declined with using BIM on a project. It was pretty sobering, seeing as most of my friends are currently intern architects at firms around the city, and it makes you wonder how architects fresh out of school will gain the experience necessary to get licensed and move up the ladder if the job of the intern architect is much less important.

Response to Anthony Yau

I agree with your assessment that there are some issues that need to be worked out with BIM, especially seeing as the industry standard for so long has been a series of 2D drawings and it will be hard to change what has been standard for decades (in the case of drafting programs such as AutoCAD) and hundreds of years (in the case of hand-drawn plans).