Suppose a philosopher’s stone, as an ancestral family belonging, is passed on to you; but you don’t realize its worth, and maintain the legacy of using it as a paperweight. It’d be so unwise of you, right? Same would be the case if EPC contractors, construction firms and civil engineers would continue to use BIM for building design and construction and not let it evolve; suffocating its real potential. The reason to lower BIM awareness is because these professionals don’t know what exactly BIM is and what will it mean for future building design and construction planners.

BIM is not software, straight and plain. BIM doesn’t work only in buildings; it extends to bridges, roads and railways as well. In fact, it also is not the solution to all of construction projects’ problems, and it certainly is possible to construct without BIM. So what is the point of so much of BIM hype?

BIM serves as a platform for networked and coherent planning for appropriate execution. Most importantly, it is frequently forgotten that BIM has the potential to practice coordinated and collaborative operation of building and construction projects.

An integral part of building, lighting designs, play a very crucial role in designing it right. If fixed appropriately, lightings will glorify the architectural beauty and if messed up, it’d diminish the design intent no matter how pretty they are. For lighting design, it also means assessment of installing, operating, and maintaining cost at an early stage.

More BIM means more lighting importance

Usually, a virtual simulation and construction scheduling is done before construction breaks the ground. There lies an opportunity for lighting and interior designers to incorporate their lighting concepts and ingrain them with the designs from the very beginning. Proper and efficient integration of lighting system and facility architecture will add to the architectural aspects. With help of BIM, lighting can be given much more importance from architectural perspective, than what it was with classical planning strategies. BIM has enabled architects and interior designing firms to go beyond technical aspects and needs of lighting and successfully unleash the beauty of actual designs of the building.

Although, with the kind of intensity in lighting, mistakes are bound to occur and they also can’t be corrected automatically. But with BIM they can at least be detected early, enabling modification in the common design database and immediately correcting the numbers of parts needed, delivery dates, costs associated, and scheduling. Also, a virtual simulation of building with light and shadow analysis will enlighten individual stakeholders to make required changes and the project owner too can get insights of what will be constructed.

More BIM means more cost effective lighting concepts

On the other hand, we see that there have been a few cases that exceeded the project budgets and timelines, while the efforts were being made towards glorifying the architecture and illumination. It may also have happened that beautifully designed buildings have very high energy consumption; increasing the operation and maintenance costs.

Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to MEP professionals that BIM has a solution for this as well, known to us as energy modeling. Light analysis with artificial light, natural light and shadow analysis of buildings using software such as eQuest and DIALux have been aligned with Industry Foundation Classes - IFC formats, making it all the more easier to connect it to BIM platforms.

With new updates in aforementioned software, it is no longer necessary to model the entire building plan in 3D. Readymade products can be imported from the internet and used for analysis. The analysis will give a complete and a comprehensive analysis of light calculation across the facility. This will develop insights and gives enough time for building design engineers to come up with alternatives.

Conclusion

Building with BIM doesn’t necessarily mean strict designs and construction planning; it means that leveraging the most of its capabilities to finish the project on time and maintaining the sanctity of designs by adhering to standards. It opens up avenues for design finalization which doesn’t let architects or MEP professionals to compromise with their designs.

If in spite of all the BIM capabilities, we still don’t use it up to the actual potential it has, we are only treating as a philosopher’s stone being used as a paperweight because that’s what our legacy has been teaching all this time.