Thursday 10 May 2012

A day of BIM

It was very interesting yesterday to chair a panel discussion at BIM Show Live with three architects discussing the benefits that they were enjoying from employing BIM. Particularly enlightening was David Miller of David Miller Architects, an enthusiastic proselytiser for the technology, even if he got into it almost by accident. He laid out all the ways that BIM was helping to make his practice more profitable, and win bigger projects. He and the other two speakers are the subjects of three of the 10 architect case studies included in Building Design's White Paper on BIM which becomes available today.

Talking at dinner afterwards with Mark Stodgell and James Savage of Pozzoni, and with Simon Rawlinson of EC Harris who is deeply involved with the government's BIM strategy, it was interesting to hear them talking about how clients do not want to hear about clash detection, because that is part of the service they think they should be getting anyway. Instead, they want ways to reduce the cost of building and, crucially, operating, their buildings.