Team BIM Unlimited, an international professional group, recently won an award for "Best Use of BIM for Sustainability or Constructability" at Build New York Live. This event was the most recent in a series of Build Earth Live events, which have been taking place since 2008 in places like London, Sydney, Quatar and Newcastle. The events are put on by Asite, makers of Adoddle, a building information modeling (BIM) oriented, cloud-based collaboration application.
Build New York Live is a 48-hour BIM competition hosted in New York City. Teams from all over the world, including ElSarhaBIM, Architechnique TM, WYG and others, compete for awards such as “Best use of BIM for Design for Community Outreach,” “Best Multidisciplinary BIM and use of Interoperability” and an overall award (which went to the Ryder Alliance).
This year's event was meant to promote the development of Manhattan's Hudson Yards, a rezoned region in the Far West Side along the Hudson River.
This rendering of the design context integrates the two buildings into the rest of the city. (Image courtesy of Rubén Hernández Fontana and Jonathan Reeves.)
Each team was tasked with redeveloping Hudson Yards into a community resource for all socioeconomic groups. The development would serve as a sports-based community outreach hub to draw people from all over the metro region. Every design was also expected to integrate the area's elevated urban park, the High Line.
Each team had 48 hours to use Asite's Adoddle cloud-based collaboration platform to publish proposals for a 60-story residential tower and a multisport community outreach arena.
Architect Rubén Hernández Fontana and his architectural team led BIM Unlimited’s group. Their architectural concept was integrated into a BIM workflow with the rest of the project team.
Smaller subgroups with different specialties worked in tandem using their own preferred software and industry foundation classes (IFCs) to exchange BIM models. The subgroups included specialists in 4D construction scheduling; structural design and analysis; mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) design and more.
In BIM Unlimited's final design, the residential tower was imagined as a flexible structure supported by an external “diagrid” (diagonal grid). The structure is integrated by a curtain wall that reflects one angle in the diagrid to create a visual pattern.
The sports arena was designed to flow naturally from the surrounding spaces. The upper part was conceived as an open green space to complement the High Line from above while also providing views of the river and integrating into the residential tower.
The University of Tokyo group used FlowDesigner to construct an image of the external airflow. (Image courtesy of the University of Tokyo student team.)
In an international competition in which teams were often comprised of members working from different time zones, the judging panel specially recognized Team BIM Unlimited for the smoothness of their collaboration and the subsequent amount of detail the team managed to include in their design.
The overall competition winners, Team Ryder Alliance, worked across several time zones with members based in the UK, Spain and Australia. Team BIM Unlimited was composed of 13 members representing eight organizations that spanned across Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Norway and the UK.
Each subdivision of Team BIM Unlimited worked with their own preferred software, meaning that the final design had to integrate a diverse array of software products. The smooth integration of assorted software solutions into the workflow is actually a common issue faced by today's manufacturers when adopting new technologies.