A new model-based exchanged standard was launched at the National Architecture Conference in Melbourne in April. To know how this operates, it is important to understand the background to another technological development in the building industry: Building Information Modelling (BIM).
BIM has been around since the late eighties or early nineties and gives a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a project in 3D form. There are four big international vendors of BIM technology at this point: Bentley, Autodesk, Graphisoft and Nemetschek. “Drawings focus on a single two-dimensional view of a building so there’s no connection,” says Australian architect, John Mitchell “But when you look at BIM, if you move a door for some reason you re-generate the drawing and all of those things are automatically updated.”
Mitchell is chairman of the Australasian Chapter of the International Alliance for Interoperability, and he is promoting the latest version of the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) standard. The IAI is an international alliance of construction industry organizations that has developed this open exchange standard for sharing model data over the life cycle of the building. “IFC is the way that you share the information of your model with another organization or person or applications,” says Mitchell.
“So an engineer could, for example, still use a BIM tool, and export say, an HPAC duct model, and share that with the architect’s full model.” The latest version of IFC, 2x3, was released in April, and integrates Geographic Information System (GIS) data. “It’s probably the most sophisticated building model standard in the world,” says Mitchell. “It is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of a building and it’s not only from the architectural design point of view, it’s from the whole life cycle demands of all sectors of industry, so a client can brief the spaces and the designer can select products and represent his projects.”
There are a few qualifiers however. For the IFC to be widely embraced, the building industry needs to make open shareable information about some building elements. At this stage, the IFC standard is a very rich specification, almost no product can actually support the functionality of the IFC standard. “It doesn’t work perfectly,” says Mitchell, “but pilots are being developed internationally.”
While Singapore, Sweden and Norway are currently leaders in this field, there are some more local examples. David Sutherland is a director at the architecture firm, Fender Katsalidis, which has been using BIM Technology for many years in their projects. Melbourne’s renowned Eureka tower, one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, was one of the documentations that derived entirely from BIM processes.
“We weren’t able to share the information or the 3D rich information with other people during that process,” says Sutherland. “In other words how we communicated with others was through 2D drawings. What we’ve been looking forward to is being able to work with other people who can share that information in rich 3D and enrich the virtual building we’re creating through that information.
Sutherland first heard about IFC at a conference in Sydney in 2002. There were, however, limitations to the technology at that time. “What we’re finding now is that the technology is maturing to the point where it has become a real tool to be used in the exploration and design of buildings. That’s the 2x3 model.”
Unlike a 2D drawing which involves relatively little intelligence about the building, a 3D model requires an actual definition of what each element is; such as a wall, a column or a slab. “At some stage we need to define those things for construction,” says Mitchell, “but it might mean bringing some of that identification earlier.”
Fender Katsilidis has been using their new Acton project in Canberra as a test bed for the new IFC standard. “It’s a very large, and very important project in Canberra because it’s part of the revitalisation of the centre of Canberra to convert it from the city of the car to a city of pedestrians,” says Sutherland. “We’re currently exploring how we will take that forward and the use of IFC as a part of the design and documentation process is one of those considerations. This is a first for us.”
Some members of the construction industry, it appears, are taking a different view to IFC. Bill Duncan, Design and Sustainability Manager of the building services company, Kell Rigby says BIM technology has made inroads on the design side of the industry more than the construction side. “Currently, the nature of on-site construction and the sub-contract market has dictated that most of the benefits to date of BIM technology have been in visualisation, services co-ordination, and clash detection,” says Duncan.
“At the moment, BIM and IFC are getting a lot of press as the cure-alls for improving construction project delivery performance. The truth is, however, that as long as the current adversarial approach is taken to Consultant and Contractor engagement, the benefits will be limited.”
Duncan believes the major impact of IFC for construction workers will be in the areas of prefabrication and reduction of on-site changes or rework. “In this case, the majority of the work that onsite construction workers do will be no different, but they will reap the benefits of more effective trade procurement and better onsite co-ordination,” says Duncan.
Kell Rigby are currently working on two projects that are BIM creations, and they claim the benefit has come from creating a collaborative project team with the better decision making that flows from this, rather than value created by the software itself.
“There is more development needed before this communication is enabled across enough software packages and platforms to make the widespread introduction of IFC worthwhile,” says Duncan.
