BIM meetings reduced to 30min

Getting the data right by using BIMcollab turned out to be a huge time saver. A 4-hour meeting was reduced to a 30-minute meeting, which left us with much more time to focus on the design. The social housing complex ‘Het Schip’ (the ship) was designed by Dutch architect Michel de Klerk in 1917, constructed in 1918, and delivered in 1919. 

Michel de Klerk is considered one of the main architects who influenced the Amsterdam school style of architecture, with ‘Het Schip’ being a prime example of this style. Eigen Haard, the owner of the complex, commissioned archivolt architecten BV as one of the members of the design team to renovate and refurbish the complex. It was mandatory for all the companies involved to use BIM. This was the first national monument project to be completely executed in BIM.


“Renovating a nearly 100-year old building using BIM, is giving new life to a historic monument”


Getting the data right

The technical design phase started with specifically determining what was needed for creating the high level renovation, and what was needed to create a Building Information Model containing all the necessary data.

Project-level communication became a rather big issue from the start. How could the stakeholders communicate all the model issues in the most efficient way? According to Eric, “In 2014, the only way we could do this as a team was by using BCF .zip files, and share them on an online platform provided by the client. Basically, the workflow was set up in a Gantt chart, which specified when a task had to be done, when a check was done, and on which day all the issues were combined to a single BCF file. These would be discussed in the BIM meeting, which was held every other week. During such a BIM meeting, all the current models were discussed with the combined issues in the mentioned BCF file. This is a rather time consuming process, because every meeting would last about 4 hours.”

Another problem was that every company had to check for issues on a certain day, but there was no overview if an issue was already reported or not; this created a lot of work for the BIM coordinator to filter out all the issues. In the latter stages of the Het Schip design phase and on a similar project that followed, archivolt switched to BIMcollab. This turned out to be a huge time saver, because there were no overlaps anymore, and response times and issue allocation was much more efficient. Read the complete story at www.graphisoft.com.