Eddy Krygiel is a senior Business Consultant with the AEC team with Autodesk Consulting. Eddy focuses on BIM and technology workflows for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) clients. He received his bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design. He has almost 20 years of experience in architectural offices and on a range of projects from single-family residential to office, federal, civic, and aviation clients. Eddy has helped firms around the country at both the firm level and the project level.
His most recent project was the Denver International Airport, where he had the role of BIM Manager for the Program Management team. The BIM role involved supporting and steering stakeholder workflows from design through construction while not impacting the overall project fee or schedule. The final deliverable to the airport was a facility management–ready BIM model for both vertical and horizontal assets. Eddy has also led or been involved in other large-scale projects that have taken BIM beyond documentation.
Eddy is the author of more than 15 books on BIM and sustainability including the Mastering Revit series and Green BIM. He also teaches BIM, construction documents, and architectural communication at the University of Kansas School of Architecture.
Foreword
There are two great secrets, or as I think of them, two great sins, in the architecture profession. The first is that the actual practice of architecture is something that has to be learned on the job, after we've committed several years, and subsequently quite a lot of money, to an educational program that has only a small amount of carryover to the actual architectural practice. The second sin is a near mirror: that the actual operation of a building is also something that has to be learned on the job and after the fact, after several years and quite a lot of money is invested in the design and construction process. This is again with a disappointing amount of carryover from the design process.
At best, the status quo provides us with adequate starting points, but is adequate really good enough? Shouldn't we aim for better? I'm no educator, and addressing the issues of architectural education is not my purview. However, as to the second sin, the matter of delivering a building that is ready not just to be occupied but also to be maintained, this is the realm I scout and probe every day. Fortunately, BIM processes, facilitated by software like the Autodesk¯ Revit¯ Architecture program, are chipping away at the embedded processes surrounding the delivered facility.
My first exposure to BIM came in graduate school at the University of Cincinnati. I was taking a skyscraper design studio and our instructor, a forward-thinking, technologically minded architect, brought in a trainer to give us a crash course in Revit the first week. This wasn't a requirement, he noted, but he wanted us to at least try out this exciting, up-and-coming software. The breakneck pace of the project resulted in most of my classmates resorting quickly to more familiar tools. I held out longer and was probably the last to change at about the midpoint of the studio. As exciting as I found the design tools at the time, the learning curve was just too steep for a single day of training, although I probably would have finished the studio in Revit if I'd had a reference as useful as this book as a guide.
My first opportunity to explore the full depth of what BIM and Revit were capable of came in 2010. I had been working for some time for a firm that was committed to BIM implementation, but most of the time our work was lonely BIM, or BIM Lite, or BIM 1.0, depending on the catchphrase du jour. This was largely owing to the requirements of our clients and the lack of similar commitment among our design partners. As cliché as it sounds, any BIM effort must begin and end with the client – if a facility owner isn't going to make use of the data developed during design and construction, then that BIM effort will be fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Although we constantly pushed our clients to do more and some great strides were made, we never got quite as far as we hoped to go.
That changed when we joined the design team for Denver International Airport's new Hotel and Transit Center and I was subsequently selected as the project BIM manager. Little did I know what a career-defining moment that decision by my boss would turn out to be.
Whereas with other projects we would have to introduce our clients to what BIM was and what benefits it could bring, on the HTC project Denver International Airport (Airport code: DEN) was taking the lead and demanding BIM – not BIM Lite, which the industry seemed to have plateaued at for so many projects, but real BIM. I daresay none of us really knew what we were getting into.
To say this was an exciting and ambitious project would be to only scratch the surface. Though an incredible opportunity, it was also at times terrifying, frustrating, and overwhelming. Few firms in the area were truly Revit literate, and none had ever worked on a project that took BIM as far as the airport wanted to go with it. The learning curve was steep for all parties involved and, naturally, the schedule was short.
The entire project was to be executed in BIM. The architectural and systems designs were done in Revit and the civil designs were developed in AutoCAD® Civil 3D® software. The general contractor and their trade subcontractors modeled all of their content as well. Spatial coordination was done in Autodesk Navisworks® software for design and construction, with the trades' means and methods reconciled back into the design models. The contractors, designers, and commissioning agents tracked RFIs, punch lists, and commissioning data in Autodesk BIM Field, and the whole shebang contained the necessary data to connect to and populate the airport's asset management program.
Fast-forward to today, and I find myself sitting on the other side of the table and up to my chin in information as the BIM manager at Denver International Airport. When our new hotel and transit center comes online in November 2015, we would, under a non-BIM process, have to manually enter the thousands of assets we track into our asset management program. This would have to take place after the contractor manually tracked a slightly smaller slice of that same information for all those assets for their own needs, and the design team manually tracked a yet again smaller slice of the information for those same assets for their needs. Duplication of effort atop duplication of effort.
That is not what we will be doing here at DEN, because of the ambitious BIM and asset management program for our 53 square miles of campus and 20 million square feet of facilities. What will happen instead is that a month before the facility opens, we will have all of the asset information easily ported from a Revit model that was created by the design team, coordinated with the built conditions via Navisworks and the Autodesk® BIM 360™ Glue® software, and informed with construction and commissioning data through BIM Field with minimal duplication of effort. Data supplementation and addition, not duplication.
It would be difficult to overstate what a significant step the adoption of BIM processes are for DEN. BIM processes and technologies are still developing for many on the facilities ownership side and the integration of BIM with an asset management program as outlined in the UK's PAS 1192-2 and 1192-3 is even further out on the cutting edge. This is particularly true in the United States, which trails the UK in asset management leadership and lacks the broad BIM requirements being rolled out there. That DEN has taken this leap to a more holistic implementation throughout the length of a facility's entire life cycle speaks to the vision and drive for industry leadership at DEN from the top down.
Our BIM models will feed information into almost every aspect of the airport's operations in one way or another – from GIS, planning, and maintenance to tenant management and finance. We'll have the data to better track and analyze our construction and maintenance processes. We have maintenance staff going into the field with tablets loaded with asset data and facilities models. Driving it all, we have all that data, all that precious information, that makes BIM so valuable and Revit such a powerful authoring tool.
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