The Top 10 Most Inspiring BIM Projects

BIM (Building information modeling) is a technology that allows the streamlining of the entire construction project within a single system, all in a structured and disciplined way, from the early design stages to the regular maintenance of a constructed building.

There are a plethora of different platforms that work with BIM projects, including the popular ones, like Revit, ArchiCAD, Revizto, Navisworks, and a lot more of the less popular ones. The technology itself is gaining more and more traction each year, with many companies joining the current trend and investing in changing their entire workflow to adapt to BIM’s methods.

In this article, we’ll be presenting some of the examples of projects that were created using BIM as the main operating system.

1. Statoil Regional and International Offices

The complex design of the structure was successfully completed as a BIM project. With the help of seamless dialogue between different phases of the project, and different people across teams, (client, contractor, architects and other working personnel) the construction was done on time with no delays.

2. Durleigh Water Treatment Works

The water treatment structure in Somerset received a major upgrade that would have been much harder to pull off without BIM at its base. A significant part of the structure was demolished and rebuilt from scratch in the form of a comprehensive 3D model with BIM calculating both the possibilities of a clash between various details and the entire structure’s operability. The addition of an Igloo-based shared virtual reality system allowed for easier interaction with the project, including design meetings, and so on. There were also a few different value engineering opportunities that were conceptualized thanks to the overall quality of the 3D model, including the wastewater area rationalization, and more.

3. Enseada House

The tight schedule of this BIM project is what made BIM, in general, that much more useful in this specific case. By creating the entire structure in less than a year and making sure that every possible clash and interaction between the parts of the structure is calculated and thought of, BIM reduced the potential delays for the initial schedule down to zero.

4. Campus Örebro: Casa Nova

BIM was utilized to its full capabilities during the design phase, allowing for seamless cooperation between the client, the contractors, the architect, and other concerned parties to create this unique building correctly and adequately.

5. St. Louis Aquarium Design

Due to the original status of the building as a National Historic Landmark, this BIM project was all about creating an intricate aquarium without disturbing the original historical structure of the St. Louis Union Station. This aquarium was comprehensive, with different water tanks and several various points of view for each tank – including “through the tanks” in some cases. BIM was successfully utilized to not only model the entire project, but also calculate the influence and the positioning of complex piping systems, life support systems, and so on. The proprietary software that was used (Revizto) also allowed all teams involved to have access to the entire 3D project from their smartphones. The construction process began in late 2017 and was completed before the grand opening in December 2018, featuring a plethora of animals.

6. Nanjing International Youth Cultural Centre

This building was the first one in China to be built upwards and downwards at the same time (top-down and bottom-up), with the entire process taking only 34 months. BIM reduced the on-site work down to 18 months with the usage of various BIM-related technologies like scalable design, seamless collaboration, and so on.

7. Leids University Medical Center

The company that was commissioned to create this medical facility (Linssen) has managed to successfully take advantage of numerous BIM project features, making all of the project’s stages faster, simpler, and more precise than before. Seamless collaboration, scalable project model, clash detection, appliances placement, material type calculation – these are just some of the BIM features that were used in the process of completing this project.

8. National Library of Sejong City.

In this case, BIM was used to model the majority of structural elements, including slabs and columns, and to confirm the viability and stability of the entire structure. BIM was also used to calculate and provide various models for the pre-construction phase about the best way to create interoperability between different elements of the structure, as well as helped with manufacturing the correct panels and curtain walls that were fundamental for the entire structure to work properly in the first place.

9. Sound Transit Operations and Maintenance Facility

The scale of this BIM project was massive, giving momentum to a region-wide expansion program that includes light rail, commuter rail, bus transit program, and more. The project itself is based in Seattle – a growing metropolis that gets more and more congested with time as one of the fastest-growing cities in the US for the last decade. This project takes advantage of multiple different software appliances, including Revit, Navisworks, Revizto, Civil 3D, and others, all to work with a BIM process that is massive in scale and requires more than just a traditional approach to finish correctly. BIM helped with a comprehensive model of the entire project, both above and below ground, and with the ability to collaborate with different parts of the project team.

10. Galaxy Tower in Utrecht

This project is another one commissioned to Linssen, but this particular BIM project is set to be constructed in 2021. Thanks to BIM, it’s easy to heavily influence the final project and its number of problems as early as the design stage, from how the system calculates all of the model clashes, material parameters, and other things like plumbing, HVAC placement, etc. Even with more unusual looking constructions such as this, a lot of nuances and problems get eliminated before they can affect the final result of the project, thanks to BIM.