Putting BIM to the test

July 2013 Our Delft project is moving along nicely. While demolition is well underway to clear the site opposite of the Reactor Institute Delft, Ector Hoogstad Architecten is working together with the contractors to further develop the design specifications for the new building of the Faculty of Applied Sciences of Delft University. The building, consisting of over 30.000sqm of floor space, contains mostly high tech laboratories for the Bionanoscience, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology departments. A complex project that absolutely requires the intensive use of state of the art BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology to fully and optimally control the design, execution and operation phase of the building’s life cycle.

Together with Valstar Simonis (consultant building installations), Pieters Bouwtechniek Delft (construction engineers) and Cauberg Huygen (consultant building physics) we developed a definitive design represented in a LOD 200-300 level BIM that was used for tendering. In this selection process contenders were not only assessed on standard ENVI criteria, but also on their abilities and experience in the use of BIM, which was prescribed as a precondition. A consortium of Hurks (main contractor), Kuijpers (building installations) and Waldner (laboratory fit out) was awarded the contract, which was signed last may. They will now work together with the design team to create a LOD 400 model for execution.

Part of the deal is also a long term contract. The decision to include maintenance in the deal provides unique opportunities to include specific information in a LOD 500 model at a very early stage.

EHA provides the complete communication management of this BIM collaboration. For this we have layed out an extensive BIM protocol that addresses not only the model’s goals and the project organization, but also basic rules about handling the model and ways and means of communication. Modeling will be done according to the Revit user group “Best Practices”. For information sharing the Autodesk 360 cloud environment is used. Other software includes Revit, Navisworks, Solibri, IBIS, Asta Power Project, VABI, BINK en 3DS.

Even to today’s standards, this type of integral, intricate and large scale use of BIM is still absolutely trailblazing, making the project remarkable in yet another way.