CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
October 27, 2004
Company News
PLH arkitekter as Wins 2005 BE Award; SBA Office Building Named Top Project in ''Building: BIM for Simulation and Visualization, Single Subject'' Category
PLH arkitekter as, a leading architectural practice based in Denmark, has won a 2005 BE Award for the SBA Group office building in Vilnius, Lithuania. The award category was "Building: BIM for Simulation and Visualization, Single Subject."
The BE Awards of Excellence, which are selected by an independent jury of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference, honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world's infrastructure. These projects set benchmarks for their industries, and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them.
The SBA Group held a competition to design a new office building that not only reflects the company's dynamism, but also its stability. PLH arkitekter's winning design achieved both goals, creating a building that presents a new and visionary structure from a set of tried and tested construction techniques.
The firm conceived and designed the new building using Bentley's building information modeling (BIM) solutions, including Bentley Architecture, and achieved exceptional results. As Brian Sheldon, an architect with PLH, explained, "The drawings generated from our Bentley Architecture 3D model gave a level of sophistication, detail, and accuracy that is seldom seen in traditional 2D drawings." Moreover, 3D modeling enabled the design to be completed in half the time.
One reason for PLH's selection of Bentley solutions was the flexibility they afforded the architects to sketch the unique forms envisioned for this building. In particular, they helped them design the main bearing structure, which consists of eight intertwined steel helixes standing as a unified tower around a central atrium.
The design expresses SBA's dynamism in the open twisting atrium structure that supports the entire building. The staggered upper floors are hung from a large helical structure that twists up from the lower parking floor to the roof terrace, providing increased floor areas higher in the building.
A large four-story lobby, with a restaurant balcony and floating meeting rooms, greets visitors to the building. Visitors arrive under the restaurant balcony, a two-story space with a vast four-story view opening towards the city. Spiral ramps within the helical structure lead visitors to the upper and lower levels, and elevators bring them to the upper office floors and conference facilities at the top of the building.
Additional Benefits of BIM
With the help of BIM and its 3D modeling, PLH was able to regularly do geometry checks of building parts and the interrelationship of part to part. At any time during the process, the architects could inspect design solutions and evaluate them for aesthetic and functional value.
To save time, the 3D model was structured so that several architects could work on the model simultaneously. The model files were divided into building parts, and the individual models were then referenced into the main model.
The visualizations, both still images and animations, were used to keep the client and local authorities up to date on the project. Visualizations could be readily produced on a day-to-day basis and consistently represented the most recent state of the design.
But PLH didn't limit itself to traditional rendering and animation techniques. It also used a real-time rendering program to quickly view the 3D model on the fly. This provided an efficient method of navigating through the model for inspections.
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