How BIM transforms the way Architectural firms design?
Successful architectural design firms know that adopting the big change requires education, training and acceptance to the new design culture
Transforming the culture: Collaborative designing
At the front end of design culture, lies how architects design, and how they amalgamate their designs. Collaborative design with iterations is the keystone for excellent designing. In a typical case scenario, at any architectural consultant or an architectural firm, a multi-disciplinary team of designers and engineers work for a wide diversity of backgrounds and the collaboration happens with BIM platform.
Collaborating is so important to architects and consultant because well-collaborated designs provide the basis for quickly conceptualizing buildings and designer can start working on downstream processes soon. Multiple design outsets of the project are easily managed and an understanding of how to build designs is developed more profoundly.
For today’s most advanced design firms, generational differences are very common. With BIM, all new innovations can boil down to collaborative approach. Simply put, BIM relies highly on the skills of a professional in AEC industry who knows how to put the fragmented pieces of designs together and turn it into a holistic building design.
An architectural firm houses every designer from a young amateur fresh out of college to anyone with significant experience of several decades in the industry working in the same team. BIM eliminates any such generational gaps prevailing amongst teams and help the firm to simulate a coordinated design model and enrich the design process. The full impact of BIM has in fact transformed the leadership and best practices and values of architectural design firms.
Achieving design distinction
Achieving design excellence lies at the core of any architectural consultant’s operational aims encompassing both, form and function. With BIM, engineers and architects are essentially able to deliver higher values of building designs, rapid iterations and better presentation with 3D geometry and rendering to help clients fulfill their requirements.
Besides, architecture isn’t a merchandise to be sold; but is a creativity-based service that comes with a multitude of laws and engineering embedded deep into the building design forms. To provide higher values of architectural designs within shorter lead times - means doing BIM.
BIM allows rigorous analyses of designs, models, and data which are digitally interlinked allow constant scrutiny of every change made and validated. Sharing of both, data and graphics are converted and made visible to all the project stakeholders alongside architects to see the whole as-built design. Like CDE allows special ease while dealing with sub-contractors and cross-team RFIs are generated. A single repository model ensures greater consistency in design update and information fetching which reduced the errors in construction planning and management.
Another aspect of excellence in designs comes with the scope of each design iteration and evaluating the best feasible one. As soon as architects create the prototypes, never ending cycle of iterations begins. BIM helps to segregate these options more quickly and often is more accurate in terms of meeting maximum design needs. The changes are evaluated and analyzed from every possible aspect of engineering and structural stability at an unparalleled speed. This essentially is an enormously big takeaway for architectural consultants, because they had to prepare markup drawings to reflect even a minor change in the past.
Not to mention, the design presentation of BIM goes beyond the aesthetical aspects. ‘Review tools’ which exists in 3D model presentation allows visualizing the project with enhanced visuals with comprehensive animation, renderings, walkthroughs and fly through which dramatically increases the design communication capability. A clear call to action is provided to the architects when clients are not satisfied with designs and architects can amend it, capture clear design expectation from clients and excellent designs aims are reached easily.
Reach only where your Client wants to, with your design culture
Like every other field, BIM has disrupted the way we design and the way in which our clients expect us to deliver those designs. BIM could essentially lead us to a completely different approach to the building designs. The shrinking of imaginative horizon even for the outlier architectural designs can be possible with reduced iterations by BIM. You have to play by the rules that BIM platforms have set. It eliminates the challenges, whatsoever, encountered, and delivers what your client wants and in a design culture that you have created at your design firm.
