Project: The Museum of the Future
Designed by: Everendai Engineering LLC
Location: Dubai, U.A.E
Won: Best BIM Project, Best Public Category Project and Winner of the Online Voting
Opening in: 2019
The Museum of the Future is essentially a planned exhibition and incubation space for innovative technology. When it’s fully constructed, the Museum will contain labs, exhibition rooms, and an auditorium for presentations. The museum is perhaps most remarkable for its unique facade, made from almost 900 stainless steel-and-fiberglass panels. The building is a torus shape (an oval with an open centre, like a doughnut) and its exterior is covered in windows in the shape of Arabic calligraphy.
Eversendai’s job on the project involved connection design, BIM implementation and coordination, workshop fabrication drawings, and structural steel erection. The project was challenging, as Everendai had to consider interface requirements and possible structural clashing, made difficult by the structure’s complicated geometry. It was made even more complex by a column-free interior design, which required a complex steelwork to support the building. To rise to the challenge, the team used 12 separate structural models to model for different elements of the building.
The initial difficulty paid off, allowing Everandai to help construct a building that will stand out against the skyline. “A building with this complexity has never been done, not with this shape of the facade and the superstructure,” says Derek Bourke, BIM manager for construction firm BAM International.
Project: Hinkley Point C
Designed by: Atkins
Location: Somerset, United Kingdom
Won: Best Industrial Project
Opening in: 2025
Hinkley Point C, a new nuclear power station under construction next to partner sites Hinkley Point A and B, is the largest building site in Europe. When it’s finished, it will house two nuclear reactors, and will be England’s first new nuclear plant in the last 20 years.
Atkins’ job on the project involved designing several work packages and creating a detailed structural design of the technical galleries, a series of underground tunnels connecting the site. They were asked to create a fully integrated 3D reinforcement model of the rebar-reinforced concrete structure, which they did with Tekla Structures.
“Atkins’ digital engineering approach to the detailed design of the technical galleries, in collaboration with the contractor and our client, complements our 50 years of experience in the nuclear sector to help make construction safer and quicker," Christophe Junillon, director in Atkins’ Energy UK & Europe business, said in an Atkins press release.
Designed by: ELU Konsult AB
Location: Sweden
Won: Best Infrastructure Project
Open in: Late 2018/Early 2019
Trafikplats Vega is a cast-in-place concrete traffic interchange with bridges, retaining walls, and a central traffic roundabout. When it's complete, the roundabout will replace two red-light crossings on the national road 73, linking road 73 with Vega, Gamla Nynäsvägen and Vendelsö.
The project's main claim to fame is that designer ELU Konsult AB created it without any paper drawings, relying on Tekla's 3D modelling software as their sole visual source. The only two-dimensional images used in the design process were drawings extracted from the team's Tekla model. The interchange's unusual shape also meant a more-than-usually complex design, and a greater number of support piles.
Designed by: A-Insinöörit Suunnittelu Oy, Skanska Oy, BST-Arkkitehdit Oy, Betonirakenne Oinas Oy, Parma Oy, Optiplan Oy and Caverion Suomi Oy—made a Tekla model that produced 3,070 digital drawings
Location: Tampere, Finland
Won: Best Commercial Project
Open: March 2019
Luminary is a 21-story "hybrid building" that houses both residential apartments and a business section with a lobby and a roof terrace. This "hybrid" structure created structural difficulties, as designers had to match up the beam-to-column frame of the business section with the load-bearing internal walls of the residential section.
Other difficulties were created by the various levels of the foundations, the fact that the building would fill its plot to its capacity, and the region's strict tolerance requirements for tall buildings (once complete, Luminary will be the tallest apartment building in the region). The design included a monorail that carries a maintenance cradle around the building, which added another layer of complexity to the design. Finally, the precast concrete units that made up the upper floors of the building had to be separately modelled so that they could be cast at the factory with the correct weight and center of gravity.
To manage all of that, the design team created a Tekla model that produced 3070 drawings and contained 220,000 objects.
Designed by: Arup & PDC Group
Location: Perth, Australia
Won: Best Sports & Recreation Project
Open in: January 2018
Optus Stadium is a multi-purpose stadium that can host cricket, rugby and soccer matches as well as entertainment events, and also includes community spaces. The stadium can currently seat 60,000 people, and the design has the capacity to potentially add 10,000 seats in the future. Two of the biggest requirements for the project were a "fan first" approach to design, and an external design with a distinctive "Western Australian" style.
On this project, Arup was responsible for developing a BIM-based workflow that would bring the stakeholders together to collaborate and ensure that everyone knew about updates to the design. The workflow was designed so that stakeholders could make modifications to their "element" of the design without losing connectivity, allowing for continuous improvements in design throughout the process. This included a process that checked the model for any changes, automatically created a report, and sent that report directly to the steel detailers involved in the project.
The State Project Team said that the workflow made their job easier: “The time spent on developing the virtual stadium, enabled resolution of coordination between all sub-consultants and sub-contractors in the construction phase.” The workflow also allowed work to finish three weeks before the deadline, a significant win in the construction industry.
Designed by: Fatih Yesevi Okur, Ebru Kalkan, Ergün Erdoğan and Rufai Demir (Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey)
Location: N/A
Won: Best Student Project
Open in: N/A
Designed as a concept for an expo fair building concept, the BlackSea-TORMis a pinwheel-shaped building whose outer walls are made from curved transparent panels. The building is supported by nine reinforced concrete circular columns, and the reinforced concrete beam slab of the floor is balanced on pillars in the basement parking floor.
Because the shape of the building was so unusual, it was difficult for the students to model in Tekla alone. So they developed their own accompanying tools and used Tekla Open API to transfer the objects created by those tools into the final Tekla model. To create a freeform model for the building's shape, the team developed a plugin they call “GrTekla" in the “.Net” environment. They also designed and imported the element connections on the roof and side surfaces from an external system.
Designed by: Baudin Chateauneuf
Location: Paris, France
Won: Best Small Project
Open in: August 2017
To update Metro station line No. 6., Baudin Chateauneuf had to redesign an identical replica of its vintage staircase that would actually give access to the wharfs below. The company faced two big challenges on its project: the environment, and the timeline.
While the existing structure had imperfections of several centimeters, new building codes meant that the new staircase had to be precise to within millimetres. To work around the imperfections, the company used Trimble RealWorks Viewer software to figure out the coordinates of the existing structure, then imported those coordinates into the Tekla model so the engineerscould figure out how their staircase would fit with the existing structure.
The other challenge was the short turnaround time. From May 2017 to mid-July 2017, the team crafted its model. This model had to be precise enough to allow for an even shorter construction time: the structure was opening to the public at the end of August. Using a BIM workflow, the team broke the project down into "slices" based on the worksite, and created detailed assembly plans
Designed by: The Kainua-Alliance—Kainuu social and health care joint authority, Skanska Talonrakennus Oy, Sweco Rakennetekniikka Oy, Sweco Architects Oy, Sweco Talotekniikka Oy, Sweco PM Oy, and Caverion Suomi Oy
Location: Kajaani, Finland
Won: Special Recognition
Open in: Fall 2021
The Kainuu Hospital project has three parts: a renovation to the current emergency building, and the construction of a new main building and logistics terminal. The renovation/construction project's structure is made of steel and concrete, but the facade is mostly covered in prefabricated wooden pieces.
The project was challenging to plan because construction couldn't be allowed to interrupt the hospital's current emergency services. Because of that, the Alliance wanted to design the buildings to be created with as many precast concrete elements as possible, to minimize worker presence on the site. They used their models to package and transfer data for the manufacturer, so they could make the precast pieces precisely.
The team also used BIM to coordinate labor and estimate building costs so that it could stay within the hospital's target price. Finally, the stakeholders wanted to create a high quality of user experience for patients and doctors, so the design team used Computer-Assisted Virtual Environment (CAVE) to “walk” through the model.
(All images courtesy of Trimble.)