Large scale construction is dominated by giant earth movers, towering steel structures and men with hard hats. The industry is about to get a tech makeover. Instead of blueprints and close-enough, seat of the pants, make-it fit attitudes, there is a new level of precision and accountability. No company knows this better than the Los Angeles-based AECOM, the fourth largest and possibly fastest growing of the big 10 construction companies in the U.S. The company recorded revenue of $18 billion in 2017. To increase its edge, help win bids and execute contracts, AECOM has committed to using building information modeling (BIM) on every project, big and small. Small is a relative term. For a company the size of AECOM, a small project is still tens of millions of dollars.
Engineering.com toured AECOM Hunt’s Innovation Center in Indianapolis to get a feel for how the big guys do it, as far as designing colossal constructions of sport, mega stadiums, airports and “smaller” projects, such as a nearby elementary school. The center shows the company’s commitment to technology as a business advantage.
The popular image of the construction industry dominated by men in hardhats has been jolted. Instead, the tech center is staffed by youngish, super tech-savvy staff—two of whom are women. Hard hats are kept on hand for the visits to job sites, but during the normal workday, the look is more like a tech company than a construction trailer.
AECOM acquired the 700-employee, $1.2-billion Hunt Construction Group in 2014 for $270 million. A crew of about 200 makes the Indianapolis offices a place to hang their hard hats. A group of techies, steeped in the latest software and hardware form the lead unit, the brain trust of leading edge technology, and strive to give the company an advantage over its competition.
Designing a whole building or structure with electrons, in CAD instead of concrete or steel, makes changes easier and less expensive. AECOM estimates each request for information (RFI) costs an architect $1,700 and a construction manager $2,800.
Indy Racetrack
We also toured the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of America’s most famous car race. The 31 race cars that compete in the Indy 500 are watched by 235,000 spectators, both around and inside the 2.5-mile track. It wasn’t enough. AECOM is adding extra seats and facilities to the 1906-era racetrack. It was a “must win.” The company could not have an out-of-town construction company touch the iconic stadium.
The application software the company uses is mostly by Autodesk. AECOM, one of the biggest construction companies in the world, is also one of Autodesk’s biggest customers. Its site-wide enterprise license allows them access to any application Autodesk makes in their industry.
When Is a Thousand Images Not Enough?
When Autodesk created its 3D reality capture/scanning service, it may have thought a thousand-photo limit per project more than sufficient. When you are testing photogrammetry for models on a table top, that’s plenty. When you are modeling stadiums, university campuses, airport sites and the like, a thousand pictures is limiting. A drone flyover over the Madame Walker Theatre site had Brad Glazier pleading with Autodesk to raise the limit of a thousand photos per project.
The Mercedes of Stadiums
The Atlanta Falcons pro football team are recent recipient of AECOM’s labors.
AECOM Hunt was the construction manager of the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, which opened in time for the 2017 football season. The stadium’s most striking feature is a retractable roof with a camera-like diaphragm apex. Each of the panels of the roof weighs 1,600 tons. The stadium was modeled with a level of detail (LOD) 300 using Tekla for its steel construction modeling and Revit for other building modeling. The 20GB of model files shows easily enough on a Dell workstation with 128MB of RAM.
The Incredible Sinking Airport
We also saw the model of Louis Armstrong National Airport, which is being built to replace the old airport. Most who travel through the current one agree a new airport is needed and are united in their opinion that the old airport is dilapidated and worn out. The new one’s terminals form an enormous sprawl over the site and are secured in place by 7,000 piles driven through the soft, silty earth of New Orleans and anchored in bedrock. The terminal complexes sit 6ft below sea level.
Michael Bridges, AECOM senior virtual design and construction engineer, showed the airport. He has been working on the model for a couple of years using Revit, BIM360, Glue and Navisworks, all by Autodesk.
Toward a Healthy Future
Kurt Stahl, AECOM senior vice president, Health Division, showed a hospital room in Studio H, AECOM’s Skunkworks for modern, hospital construction technology that centers on prefabricated sections assembled on the job site. The “H” in the Studio H may be for hospitals, health and/or Hunt. We were shown one room so weirdly angular that it could only have been built as a challenge. Exactly, according to Stahl.
“If we can build technology into walls that connect at even crazy angles, we can prefab anything,” he said.
Stahl has spent 10 years in the health care division. His team does four to five hospitals a year. Health care and the building of hospitals is seen as a great future business for AECOM with an enormous potential. The company may have saturated the major metropolitan areas in the United States with stadiums, but plenty of high-tech hospitals are waiting to be built. The business value of a modern surgical room is an astounding million dollars a day, we are told.
AECOM hopes to upend the traditional approach to construction with one that involves taking building materials to a building site and using onsite assembly. Making as much of a building or structure offsite, in a controlled environment, for example, makes for more precise and repeatable wall units. The wall panels containing the plumbing, wiring, vacuum lines, etc., can be loaded onto a trailer and be connected onsite. AECCOM’s Studio H works as a test bed for prefab technology.
One advantage of prefab is that it takes care of a huge problem on job sites: the lack of skilled labor. Construction sites operate while they are missing 30 percent of a full workforce, Stahl said. Building as much as possible indoors will make for more appealing and safer working conditions. Less people are needed outdoors for assembly of larger but fewer pieces.
A prefab hospital room took five days to construct versus over 15 days with normal on-site construction methods, according to the Studio H brochure.
With prefab, an operation room can be made modular and customized. Some hospitals will outfit an operating room for a right-handed surgeon and another for one who is left handed. This is possibly thanks to a modularity design.
Another advantage to owners of hospitals is that prefab wall units can be purchased as furniture, as opposed to “stick-built” walls. Furniture can be fully depreciated over 10 years.
Amazon Echo
For the high-tech Studio H, the team started with Amazon Echo, the consumer device that understands human demands, especially when it comes to ordering from Amazon. Seriously, Amazon’s AI as used for voice recognition and response, or natural speech, is second only to Google. It would have been a natural to use for patient commands, such as “Nurse, please come quickly.” However, Amazon’s smart speaker, like other smart speakers, transmits data to the cloud. The health information patient privacy act (HIPPA) forbids patient data from leaving the sacrosanct patient/doctor privilege, i.e., go outside hospital walls. This leaves Stahl’s team to recreate the voice activated commands on their own.
The Walls Have Ears, and Gas and Vacuum Lines
One large back-lit photo display is really a reactive display. It’s like an iPhone, only as big as a TV. It’s provided by DIRTT, a tech-driven manufacturer of customized interiors, has already created a prefabricated patient room.
The modern hospital does all that it can to keep germs out, almost requiring rooms be sealed off. This is somewhat of a challenge for prefab, which can have porous seams between prefab panels. Stahl said they solved that problem with a seal. Pressed into seams, the plastic strips seal off the rooms. In surgery rooms, where even less infestation is tolerated, the seals are so tight that if panels have to come down, the strip must be routed out.
Walls may never have been smarter.
Level of Detail
LOD 300 models are used down to the doorknob. That’s millimeter accuracy (10-3m). An airport is modeled to the scale of kilometers (10+3m). That’s six orders of magnitude.
Virtual Reality
For creating virtual reality (VR) models, AECOM’s tool of choice is Nscape. A plug in to Revit, it creates a virtual reality model locally. AECOM Assistant VDC Manager Brad Glazier’s idea of a local is a hulking 128MB RAM Dell workstation. It’s faster than sending it to the cloud for processing, which is what has to be done with Revit Live.
Nscape works much better than Revit Live, Glazier said. On the forefront of VR for largescale BIM, his team has also considered TwinMotion and Lumion to create VR content.
Getting Schooled
The Walnut Grove Elementary School, in an affluent suburb of Indianapolis, is a 100,000-square-foot facility with a project cost of $42 million. For a company used to building billion-dollar stadiums and international airports, the school represents one of its smaller projects. It is important to AECOM’s roots in the local community.
The school is not named for trees cut down to make room for it, as are most developments with woodsy names. Rather, the name comes from the architect’s vision, which will present a walnut tree motif placed in terrazzo stonework as well as a central stylized metallic sculpture and other art scattered from one end of the sprawling school to the other.
Parochial Interests
When a high-tech, 3D, BIM-touting, billion-dollar construction project firm scoops up a project in a suburban school district, a high-tech approach can clash with more parochial concerns.
We came to the school district with 6D BIM vision, according to AECOM representatives. The architect was not interested. They wanted 2D. Drawings, said Dalton, incredulous. AECOM had practically declared war on 2D, with him leading the charge. It was a war that was won, he thought.
“All of our projects are BIM now” he said. “I expect there will be no drawings plotted out and hung up in the construction trailer. But, there are. “What are those pieces of paper?” Dalton asked. The workers gave excuses.
During our visit, the steelwork had been put in place. The entire steel structure was modeled and displayed on an iPad.
We noticed a beam that looked like it may have been joined where it should have been continuous and questioned it. However, a quick check on the iPad of the steel structure showed the members had been constructed exactly as the model showed. It was an immediate and impressive display to the power of BIM modeling.
Single Source of Truth
The construction trailer used to be the place where last minute changes were printed out and sent to the people in the hardhats. Except for a few drawings that lingered, like endangered animals, the crew seemed happy enough with digital access to the design in the cloud. There was great satisfaction in everyone on the construction site having access to the most recent model—a single source of truth. Building to an outdated drawing seems to already be relegated to horror stories from the past.
With an Internet connection available onsite, the latest version of the model is accessed from anywhere in the world, from the construction site, to the tech center in Indianapolis and all the way to AECOM’s Los Angeles headquarters, as well as to the customer, if so desired. Everything down to the bolted joints, doorknobs, lights, etc., is on display. The amount of data you can see, or whether you can see it at all, is controlled by AECOM’s system administrator.
“We love the cloud,” Dalton said.