CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
21 February 2007
Implementation Investments
Building Design Partnership Wins BE Award
Building Design Partnership (BDP) Ltd has won a 2006 BE Award for its Bridge Academy, Hackney project in the United Kingdom. The award category was "Building: BIM for Multiple Disciplines."
BDP was appointed as architect, structural engineer, and building services engineer for the Bridge Academy, a new secondary school in the London Borough of Hackney. The Bridge Academy is being constructed on the site of an abandoned Victorian school adjacent to the Regent's Canal.
Bentley software provided BDP with significant benefits at various stages of the school's design. As Michelle McDowell, director, civil and structural engineering, BDP, pointed out, "The multiprofession design team used Bentley products to deliver the design information for the project. The combination of visualizations, Building Information Modeling (BIM), and traditional 2D drawings cut from the model developed with Bentley Structural and Bentley Mechanical Systems enabled the team to inspire the client and investor and assist in their understanding of the building form."
Continued McDowell, "These Bentley tools made the definition of the complex geometry fast, accurate, and efficient, and empowered the team to design a tight-fit building with architecture, structure, and building services fully coordinated before starting on site."
The primary challenge for the design team was to fit a school for 1150 pupils, including a 450-seat performing arts theater, a 180-seat lecture hall, and sports facilities, on a site with a very small footprint. This was exacerbated by the boundary formed by the canal on one side, limiting opportunity for future expansion.
BDP's design solution was to build upwards, creating a vertical school more than seven stories high. The project is rather like a piece of origami, with elements folded over each other to provide a 10,000-square-meter building on a 6500-square-meter site with 5500 square meters of outdoor space.
With the client brief calling for open, accessible learning, the team designed a building without columns and dispensed with dark corridors and corners. Teaching spaces are accessed from open balconies that look out over the canal, allowing light to flood through the building.
Bentley's BIM solutions were the key to efficiently and clearly realizing the building's unique organic form. BIM made it easy to not only generate the form, but also adjust it to suit the internal space requirements, establish the setting out of the floor plate edges, and accurately define the geometry of the ETFE envelope cladding.
The north and south halves of the "Sound Shell," which houses almost all of the main teaching spaces, are arranged on half levels so that adjacent spaces are reached by 10 steps in the staircase, providing stronger links across the different academic departments. BIM eloquently articulated this blueprint for use and manipulation by the design team.
An unanticipated result of using Bentley's BIM solutions on this project was a change in traditional workflow, with the structural engineering team taking ownership of setting out the building form, which is normally driven by the architect. Through collaborative work on the model, the building form was easily established and defined for use in the structural engineering, building services, and architectural packages. Because the structural virtual model took the lead role in the design development, the architectural and services schemes were wrapped around and through the building model to ensure best fit.
BDP was able to integrate the entire Building Information Model with Bentley's STAAD structural engineering software for analysis and design, and then use the final results in the Bentley Structural model. This reduced the time required to test design options on this complex building by about a third. In addition, by producing a single model, BDP was able to cut out the normal duplication of work required to produce a model for analysis and another for building definition.
For more information on BDP's winning project and all of the other 2006 BE Award projects, visit http://www.be.org/awards . For more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit http://www.bentley.com/bim .
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