Architects can benefit enormously with the use of BIM technology just like engineers, surveyors and contractors.
The idea behind this popular technology is to collaborate and coordinate designs helping with common strategies. If communication with other professionals flows, it will make your life way easier.
Read on and find out which are the benefits of BIM for architects.
1. Start Seeing your Designs in a Holistic Manner:
Approaching teamwork in a holistic manner is always a winner. Considering all the people in charge of the design and the construction of the building part of a team running together for a common goal can save you time and money.
IPD (Integrated Project Delivery) and CDE ensure that BIM can be the holistic tool to manage the team. You can deliver the most solid build design development to the team you have ever delivered with BIM technology.
2. Create your RFIs Easier Than Ever:
RFIs are the multiple teams that work independently from each other in a project to achieve multiple goals within a big project. In fact, the bigger the project, the higher amount and more populated the RFI for its completion.
Once RFI technology is applied, the generation of the RFIs and all other technical documents that draw from the 3D model is much easier than what it used to be. The system also allows to track all changes done to the document.
3. Retention of your Design:
All changes made on BIM can be traced back all the way to the beginning of the process. Unlike other, more traditional methods, what happens is that you are not doing it by hand every time it happened and writing it down.
That old process took a long time and most of the times, quality suffered a lot from this lack of time to focus on it.
Also, when using some BIM platforms like for example Navisworks, you can track changes made by everyone in that project whichever is the role that they play in the construction.
Besides that, BIM designers can reuse the designs partially or entirely.
4. Develop your Design Much Faster:
The same quality of speed and accuracy that separates the old blueprints and the CAD-drawn plans is the one that separates CAD with BIM.
With the use of BIM, you can create in 2D and then effortlessly develop them in 3D; that way you can even create an animated walkthrough or other animated videos.
Another great feature of BIM is that if you happen to make a modification to the plan and change the measurements of a certain part of your building, all other adjacent measurements will be arranged and taken care of immediately and automatically.
5. Reduction of Errors:
It is not a myth, but a true fact that we have to award to science: since the designs and the plans moved from the 2D blueprints into the computers, their accuracy has been increased drastically.
Fast forward to the present, BIM modeling allows you to check the coherence of what you are trying to do. For example, if you happen to change the design of a window by maybe making its width different, the according to changes to the walls will be carried on by BIM automatically.
6. Improve the Insights in your Spatial Arrangements:
The days in which each room of the house was drawn with a line on a blueprint are long gone. Now architects have a great tool that can create a floor plan and better explain their ideas for each space.
The design can be done in 3D and all kitchen, bedroom, etc… furniture can be made precisely for a better impact on your clients. It will take them just one look to figure out if they like the design and also the distribution of the house you have designed.
7. Coordinate Every Part of your Design:
With BIM you can be on top of the game at all times. Complete Design Coordination (CDC) is the tool you can use to coordinate your entire working team in only one place (which doesn´t have to be physically the same).
Besides this feature, BIM can really help you fix any issue your design might have in terms of logic, coherence and physics. With BIM you are in control of the design from day one till day completed.
Conclusion:
The benefits of BIM are plenty and you should not step down from this technology or you´ll lag behind all your competition. The time to embrace BIM technology is now.
As with any other architectural software tool, the more time you are behind the commands, the more time you are learning and that edge of knowledge and experience can give you a competitive advantage over all the other firms competing in your own territory.