A Brief Description Of BIM’s Evolution And Its Adoption In AEC Industry
There is hardly any doubt that the last few decades have seen humongous changes in the construction practices followed by architects and engineers across the globe. Do you have any idea what motivated design and construction professionals to switch from traditional construction methods to an all together heigh-tech approach towards building construction? Well, the answer is quite obvious, it’s because of their desire to produce better buildings and infrastructure in the cost-effective way.
And their desire to produce high-quality buildings, became possible only after Building Information Modeling came into the picture.
Take a look at the evolution of BIM
- The evolution of the concept of this peculiar technology dates back to 1960s. The idea of BIM evolved from Douglas C. Englebart’s paper titled as Augmenting Human Intellect.
- Douglas C. Englebart, an American engineer and computer pioneer, introduced to people a very uncommon concept of future architect in 1962 through this paper Augmenting Human Intellect.
- Englebart emphasized on object based design and parametric modeling in his paper, which took years to transform into reality.
- Apart from Englebart, there were various other design professionals whose contributions played a significant role in the evolution of virtual design and construction such as Herbert Simon, and Ian McHarg.
- In fact, there was a huge competition among AEC professionals across the globe to come up with a dynamic technology (software) that can help them in simplifying the design process, along with improving the design quality.
- In this way, with the constant efforts of design researchers in this direction, they finally came up with such software products which can fulfill the requirement of Building Information Modeling.
- Revit, which is developed by Autodesk – an American software manufacturing company is one such software, which facilitates the development of parametric models.
- Once BIM software products came into picture, AEC professionals switched from regular CAD modeling to parametric
- Parametric modeling gives an opportunity to building information modelers to make necessary modifications in the 3D model with great ease.
- Unfortunately this option was unavailable in CAD modeling, due to which it becomes difficult for design professionals to make changes in the model for improving design quality. That remains one of the reasons for the quick adoption of BIM by design professionals.
In addition to that BIM also gives detailed information about schedules, materials needed to accomplish the project, and bill of materials etc., to AEC professionals.
Divya Dave