Growth through BIM - Institution of Civil Engineers

5.14. Landscape Architects. The landscape profession goes backto the eighteenth century and the landed estates. It now uses GIStechnology to work with landform, infrastructure and location information,but will need to embrace BIM for hard landscape and involvementwith buildings and civil works. BIM and GIS convergence is part of thecurrent developmental need. Profession-specific modelling software isnow available.5.17. Town Planners. The planning profession is under severalstresses currently, some political and some technical. It emerged outof architecture at the start of the twentieth century but has become alargely managerial discipline. Development control entails processingthe design of proposed development through several filters, includingcurrently the sustainability performance of the design. Arguably suchsubjects are Building Regulation matters requiring non-planning skills.BIM offers support to the planner in enabling designs to be checked5.15. Other design professions. Interior and graphic designers,lighting and acoustic specialists, fire and fabric engineers, geotechnicaland traffic engineers, all will need to migrate onto a BIM platform tocontinue to collaborate with the design and construction team. Theircurrent computer-based techniques will need to be rewritten to runon a model, or feed from and back into a model. They will most likelyfollow the lead of the architects and engineers with whom they usuallywork.automatically against constraints. Singapore has been operating combinedplanning and building regulation processing on an automatedbasis for ten years. The planning rules need to be formatted for thispurpose and UK rules have a performance and discretionary approachrather than a ‘deemed to satisfy’ one. Consideration needs to be givento the potential for a BIM-based approach for the UK, as part of a reviewof the machinery of planning control. BIM can also speed up thecreation of guidance plans and design codes to allow plan-led control toillustrate acceptable development to applicants as well as to be a basis5.16. Building Surveyors. Surveyors are a very old profession:Christopher Wren was described as Surveyor to the Kings Works beforehe became known as an architect. The term now describes an expertin construction maintenance and repair, including measuring sites andbuildings to convert them into drawings. BIM was not seen as relevantto work to existing buildings until recently when laser point-cloudfor automated checking. One issue to be explored is the timing of planningpermission in the BIM Plan of Work. As most design work is nowdone by Stage 3, the classic point for planning application, developerswill be loath to commit to such investment before knowing that theycan get permission. Increased use of illustrated outline permission atStage 2 would be logical, with details reserved to Stage 3 before anystart on site.surveying emerged as a rapid way to capture existing buildings andlandforms into digital format. BIM tools are now centrally relevant toBuilding Surveyors in their asset management tasks: they will also beusing COBie as will Facility Managers.G r o w t h t h r o u g h B I M59