Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

10 Dec 2004

 

Mac CAD: ArchiCAD drives project efficiency for Skanska

Stockholm architects leverage Graphisoft's ArchiCAD while contractor convinces owner that the Virtual Building™ model is more valuable than Autocad

For a 8,000 square meter academic project in Sweden, Skanska convinces the project owner to forget about Autocad and use ArchiCAD instead. Tornberget, the project owner for the school project, stipulated that the project had to be carried out in Autocad. However, the initial design model used to win the competition phase of the new project was done in ArchiCAD by architects Kristian Lindgren Arkiteker. When the construction company Skanska saw the efficiency that could be brought to bear on the project by employing the full nature of the virtual building model method, they used their influence with the owner to allow the building to be done in ArchiCAD.

Model Consistency and Quality Control

From a centralized project model of the building over 130 construction drawings were produced. "For me ArchiCAD is a natural tool. I have used it for 10 years and it feels very natural," says Stig Bengtsson, Project Manager, Jacobson and Flank, the production architects charged with producing the working drawings for the project.

Skanska started to request quantity take-offs from the virtual building to ensure that the subcontractors' bids were correct. This was a benefit to Skanska because it allowed them to check for inaccuracies as well as charge for the additional work. For the architects, quality control was another way to fully utilize the versatility of the virtual building approach -- often called building information modeling (or BIM) in the AEC industry's CAD nomenclature.

The building's new roof was based on concrete columns and a new steel structure, which was critical from a height point of view. "We carried out clash detection with the steel construction and found errors in 3D that had been undetectable in 2D. We examined the shop drawings of the steel construction and found a steel beam that was too low," explains Bengtsson. "We had to do some rapid redesigning to solve the problem. If we hadn't created 3D models, we wouldn't have found this problem and we would ultimately have been held liable. Solving this issue on site would obviously have been very costly." The Virtual Building not only detected the error, but it also accelerated the entire redesign operation.

Bengtsson sees ArchiCAD's main benefit as being that all project revisions are automatically made to the drawings; any change made in the 3D model ensures that all the linked documentation changes. "I am absolutely convinced that we are faster at creating construction documentation when leveraging the full power of ArchiCAD and building a 3D Virtual Building model, instead of using traditional 2D functionality," he concludes.

For more information and the full press release go to: www.graphisoft.com

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