Making IFC child’s play – Lego Architecture meets Open BIM – Wednesday 8th Feb 2017

We had hoped to start our Spring series with a great pairing of speakers on all things IFC. Unfortunately Prof Arto Kiviniemi was taken ill on the day of our event so couldn’t present. However he had shared his presentation with us so with a wing and prayer I was able to share a few of his slides with the audience to help them get a partial understanding of what IFC is, how it came about and why is it so important to the construction industry as an exchange format and therefore a collaboration tool.

One of Arto’s early slides was a screen shot of a 1994 video published by the International Alliance of Interoperability that explained the early days of the IFC schema and the aims of the movement that became BuildingSMART International in 2008 @buildingSMARTIn. The history of BuildingSMART can be seen here, together with the full video from 1994 that we watched at the event. http://buildingsmart.org/about/about-buildingsmart/history/

It might be over 20 years old but it’s still well worth a watch. Thanks must go to Dr Stephen Hamil @StephenHamilNBS at The NBS for finding and sharing this video via YouTube.

We were also very lucky to have Richard Kelly, http://buildingsmart.org/about/community/operations-director/ the Operations Director at BuildingSMART International as a delegate in our audience and even luckier that he agreed to speak about BuildingSMART to our delegates. Richard spoke about the current structure and role of BuildingSMART and explained about some of the projects being carried out globally to improve and widen the use cases of the IFC schema. For more details on BuildingSMART refer to their website here http://buildingsmart.org/

And so to Rob Jackson, @bondbryanBIM Steering group member of thinkBIM and international speaker on open BIM in general. Over the last few months Rob has been blogging about BIM through the theme of Lego Architecture. The physical building, the Villa Savoye from the Lego Architecture series, has been digitally modelled by Rob and then put through its paces in a variety of software platforms to prove a huge number of BIM workflows. What followed was Rob’s unique blend of insight, honest appraisals and on-the-fly demos using a variety of software applications. It’s hard to capture everything that his presentation encompasses but fortunately he recently delivered this presentation to BuildingSMART Canada via a webinar and here is the link to re-live the presentation.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7cNHho4Klu8Z1RuMDVOaU1STVE/view

For a more in depth review of each stage of the process please go to Rob’s excellent blog pages http://bimblog.bondbryan.com/  The Lego Architecture series of blog pieces began in March 2016. His site also has a really useful resources section http://bimblog.bondbryan.com/document/ covering BIM Documents and BIM Acronyms – all great and free resources of rather industry to benefit from his research and genuine passion to make the industry better through digital workflows.

March 2017,

Duncan Reed