1 BLIGH STREET
THE ARCHITECTS
Figure 5.
Conceptual sketches of 1 Bligh Street building.
Image courtesy Architectus and Ingenhoven Architects.
A novel design proposal by Architectus and Ingenhoven5 was chosen the winner (amongst another eleven submissions) of the DB RREEF / City of Sydney design competition for 1 Bligh Street. As part of the design competition, collaboration between design firms was requested and architects were asked to collaborate with other practices, particularly at the environmental level. As noted by the Architectus Design Director: “we search, found and selected Ingenhoven to collaborate with us primarily on the basis of their architecture, the compatibility of our organisations and our view, and their experience on double skins façades in particular.” Ingenhoven’s experience with double skin façades was a success factor in achieving the high environmental objectives set for the project.
However, collaboration between the two companies needed to be carefully managed, especially when Architectus is located in Sydney and Ingenhoven in Dusseldorf, Germany. Besides their geographic separation, the two companies also needed to manage the differences between their documentation methodologies. Whilst Architectus had at the time completed six constructed projects using BIM (BIM Stage 1 – see Glossary) and over five years steadily perfecting their BIM procedures, Ingenhoven had no experience with BIM. Early in the project it was considered that undertaking technology and methodology transfer from Architectus to Ingenhoven would have added problems and risks to the project and thus the idea was discarded. The decision was taken that Ingenhoven was to document 1 Bligh Street as they normally would using Bentley 6 Microstation® (without a BIM approach) and forward it to Architectus. Then, the latter firm would coordinate the documentation into the BIM model. Halfway into the documentation Ingenhoven considered adopting BIM, but it was deemed too risky and the idea was abandoned for this project. Since Ingenhoven were not the drivers for BIM on 1 Bligh Street they were not interviewed as part of this case study.
The transition from CAD to BIM Although Architectus had a heavily customised CAD platform (still used in some projects) which contains tens of thousands of lines of customised code, they were looking for a process to better document their projects and saw BIM as a way to achieve it. The architects tried several applications and even ran an entire project in
5
Ingenhoven, refer to: http://www.ingenhovenarchitekten.de
6
Bentley Microstation®, refer to:
http://tinyurl.com/microstation
CRC for Construction Innovation, BIM National Guidelines and Case Studies Project (2007-02-EP)
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