BIM

In the seven years since the term “Building Information Modeling” or BIM was

first introduced in the AEC industry, it has gone from being a buzzword with a

handful of early adopters to the centerpiece of AEC technology, which encompasses all aspects of the design, construction, and operation of a building.

Most of the world’s leading architecture, engineering, and construction firms

have already left behind their earlier, drawing-based, CAD technologies and

are using BIM for nearly all of their projects. The majority of other firms also

have their transitions from CAD to BIM well underway. BIM solutions are now

the key technology offered by all the established AEC technology vendors that

were earlier providing CAD solutions. In addition, the number of new technology providers that are developing add-on solutions to extend the capabilities of

the main BIM applications in various ways is growing at an exponential pace.

In short, BIM has not only arrived in the AEC industry but has literally taken it

over, which is particularly remarkable in an industry that has historically been

notoriously resistant to change.

It is important to keep in mind that BIM is not just a technology change,

but also a process change. By enabling a building to be represented by intelligent objects that carry detailed information about themselves and also understand their relationship with other objects in the building model, BIM not only

changes how building drawings and visualizations are created, but also dramatically alters all of the key processes involved in putting a building together:

how the client’s programmatic requirements are captured and used to develop

space plans and early-stage concepts; how design alternatives are analyzed for

aspects such as energy, structure, spatial configuration, way-finding, cost, constructability, and so on; how multiple team members collaborate on a design,

within a single discipline as well as across multiple disciplines; how the building is actually constructed, including the fabrication of different components

by sub-contractors; and how, after construction, the building facility is operated and maintained. BIM impacts each of these processes by bringing in more

intelligence and greater effi ciency. It also goes over and beyond improving existing processes by enabling entirely new capabilities, such as checking a multidisciplinary model for confl icts prior to construction, automatically checking a

design for satisfaction of building codes, enabling a distributed team to work

simultaneously on a project in real time, and constructing a building directly

from a model, thereby passing 2D drawings altogether. It is hardly surprising,

then, to fi nd that BIM has also become the catalyst for significant process and

contractual changes in the AEC industry such as the growing move towards

IPD or “Integrated Project Delivery.”

Given how vast BIM is, both as a multi-disciplinary design, analysis,

construction, and facilities management technology, as well as the harbinger

of dramatic process changes, it would seem almost impossible to distill the

essence of it in a book. Yet this is precisely what The BIM Handbook has been

able to do. It provides an in-depth understanding of the technology and processes behind building information modeling, the business and organizational

issues associated with its implementation, and the advantages that the effective

use of BIM can provide to all members of a project team, including architects,

engineers, contractors and sub-contractors, facility owners and operators,

as well as building product suppliers who need to model their products so

that they can be incorporated into the building model. The book is targeted

towards both practitioners in the industry as well as students and researchers

in academia. For practitioners, it provides not just a deeper understanding

of BIM but practical information including the software applications that are

available, their relative strengths and limitations, costs and needed infrastructure, case studies, and guidance for successful implementation. For students

and researchers, it provides extensive information on the theoretical aspects of

BIM that will be critical to further study and research in the field.

First published in 2008, The BIM Handbook is authored by a team of

leading academics and researchers including Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholz,

Rafael Sacks, and Kathleen Liston. It would be diffi cult to fi nd a team more

suited to crafting the ultimate book on BIM. Chuck Eastman, in particular,

can be regarded as the world’s leading authority on building modeling, a

field he has been working in since the 1970s at universities including UCLA

and Carnegie-Mellon. I referred to his papers and books extensively during

the course of my own Ph.D. work in building modeling while I was at UC

Berkeley. In 1999, he published the book Building Product Models: Computer

Environments Supporting Design and Construction, which was the first and

only book to extensively compile and discuss the concepts, technologies, standards, and projects that had been developed in defi ning computational data

models for supporting varied aspects of building design, engineering, and construction. He continues to lead research in the area of building product models

and IT in building construction in his current role as Professor in the Colleges

of Architecture and Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,

and Director of Georgia Tech’s Digital Building Laboratory. In addition to his

research and teaching work, Chuck is very active in industry associations such

as the AISC, NIBS, FIATECH, and AIA TAP, and is a frequent speaker at

industry conferences.

Given his credentials and those of his co-authors including Paul Teicholz,

who founded the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) at Stanford

University and directed that program for 10 years; Rafael Sacks, Associate

Professor in Construction Management at the Technion (Israel Institute of

Technology); and Kathleen Liston, also from Stanford University and an industry practitioner, it is hardly surprising that The BIM Handbook continues to be

one of the most comprehensive and authoritative published resources on BIM.

This new second edition, coming three years after the publication of the first

edition, keeps up with all of the rapid advances in BIM technology and associated processes, including new BIM tools and updates to the existing tools,

the growing availability of model servers for BIM-based collaboration, the

increasing focus on extending BIM technology all the way through to facilities

management, the growing use of BIM to support sustainable design and lean

construction, the integration of BIM with technologies such as laser-scanning

to capture as-built conditions, and the growing momentum of alternate delivery models such as IPD. The new edition also greatly expands upon the case

studies section of the fi rst edition, highlighting several new projects that have

pushed the boundaries of BIM use to achieve exceptional results, both in signature architecture as well as more common building designs.

The book is well organized with an executive summary at the beginning of

each chapter providing a synopsis of its content and a list of relevant discussion questions at the conclusion of each chapter targeted towards students and

professors. In addition to a bibliography, it includes a very useful Company

and Software Index towards the end of the book that lists all the different

software applications that were discussed in the book and the corresponding

page numbers, not only making it easy to fi nd the sections where a particular

software is discussed, but also to get an at-a-glance overview of the extensive

range of BIM and related applications that are currently available.

It is not often that practitioners in a fi eld can get the benefi ts of an extensively researched and meticulously written book, showing evidence of years of

work rather than something that has been quickly put together in the course

of a few months, as most industry-focused books tend to be. The AEC industry

has been fortunate to have this distinguished team of authors put their efforts

into creating The BIM Handbook. Thanks to them, anyone in the AEC industry looking for a deeper understanding of BIM now knows exactly where to

look for it. It brings together most of the current information about BIM, its

history, as well as its potential future in one convenient place. It is, of course,

the must-have text book on BIM for all academic institutions who would like

to teach or research this subject, given the academic and research credentials

of its authors. There were many sections of the book that were illuminating

and insightful even to someone like me, who has been analyzing and writing

about AEC technology for close to ten years now. This helps to gauge how

much value the book would bring to an AEC practitioner whose prime focus

would be on the actual process of design, construction, or operation of a building rather than a full-time study of the technologies supporting it. True to its

title, The BIM Handbook indeed serves as a handy reference book on BIM for

anyone working in the AEC industry who needs to understand its current and

future technological state of the art, as BIM is not only what is “in” today but

is also the foundation on which smarter and better solutions will be built going

Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D.

Founder and Editor, AECbytes