by Michael Tardif, Assoc. AIA
Contributing Editor

Summary: When the Onyx Group, an Alexandria, Va., firm with a strong core business in planning, set out to grow its fledgling five-year-old building design practice, building information modeling (BIM) was not on its radar screen. But when Rob Smedley, AIA, first met with the firm’s leaders to explore joining the firm as director of design, he made it clear that BIM would be part of the equation. “This is the way I work,” he explained.

In his previous position as a studio head in a large, multi-office A/E firm, Smedley had come to realize the potential of BIM. But though his design team had success using BIM on its very first projects, Rob had less success overcoming the institutional inertia of the large, diversified design organization in which he worked. He was determined that if he was going to change jobs, he would find—or create—an environment in which he would be free to deploy the latest design tools and technologies. Smedley credits Onyx President Phil Rush for being supportive from the beginning. “Phil thought that design technology should have been capable of this 20 years ago,” he said.

Defining a new business culture
With support from the firm’s leadership and the assistance of Mike Brainerd, Assoc. AIA, a colleague who followed him to the firm within a few months, Rob set out to build a design practice that was 100 percent BIM from the very first day. Rob and Mike oversaw the completion of the firm’s then-existing projects using AutoCAD, but all new projects since have been started and completed using Autodesk REVIT exclusively.

To be sure, Rob and Mike had the advantage of defining the culture and business practices of a new business unit within the 30-person, multi-office firm and choosing their own staff. James Huynh, Assoc. AIA, a young architecture graduate who had been with the firm less than a year and the only staff member on Rob’s team who predates Rob’s own tenure, was eager to make the transition from CAD to BIM. New staff members join the team knowing that BIM is the modus operandi.

“In school, I worked with FormZ, but that’s a visualization tool, not a modeling tool,” said Huynh. “When I joined Onyx, I was redlining 100 percent of the time, making corrections to drawings. When Rob came, and we got involved with BIM, I quickly saw the benefit. Now, when I ‘draw’ I’m actually constructing a virtual building. I’m always aware that I am working on a building, not just an isolated object or a detail. I can envision how the building looks, and I can ask questions that lead to the right decision making.”

New management practices
The biggest challenge of working in BIM for Onyx is in management. To be used effectively, BIM has to be deployed in a closely collaborative environment. Brainerd, who oversees day-to-day operations, spends a lot of his time in teaching mode. “Interns make a lot of mistakes—it can’t be helped—but our interns are learning far more quickly,” said Smedley. “They have to use their judgment. They have to understand how the building goes together. A big part of Mike’s role is continuously checking the model to make sure it’s coming together correctly.”

“[Before BIM], I spent most of my time marking up drawings, preparing redlines for less-experienced team members,” said Brainerd. “Now I walk around, look at the building model, and watch the changes taking place. I conduct interference checking on the model all the time; it’s one of REVIT’s most important features. We’re building a virtual building, so we don’t have to mentally or manually coordinate plans, sections, and elevations. We can constantly check things such as wall types and make adjustments on the fly, and then send that information to our design-build contractor partners, especially material quantities. The final documentation is much more coordinated.”

Erin Powers joined the firm fresh out of architecture school and is in the vanguard of the generation for whom “CAD” will be no more familiar than pin-bar drafting was to the CAD generation.

“When I’m working in REVIT, I’m not just drawing a wall with two lines,” noted Powers. “I have to know what that wall is made of. If I were just doing redlines in AutoCAD, I wouldn’t necessarily have to know what those lines represent. I’m learning much more quickly, because I have to understand how the building goes together. The model is only as smart as you are. I learn to make better decisions at every step.”

Smedley and his team have not yet been able to extend their collaborative BIM environment to their design consultants, but they are working on it. “I constantly ask our consultants, ‘If you used BIM, why would we work with anyone else?’” said Smedley. But the firm does not yet command enough of its consultants’ market share to compel them to use BIM tools. That will soon change: Onyx is about to sign a contract with a Virginia-based national chain of gourmet coffee shops, and will be able to assure its engineering consultants of a steady stream of as many as 25 projects per year. “That will be enough for us to be able to make BIM a requirement,” said Smedley.

Designing and building with confidence
Smedley and his team have seen demonstrable benefits of BIM in improved client and builder communications. “I have never gone into a competitive presentation environment and lost the job,” said Smedley. “Once the project begins, clients have far greater confidence in our joint decision making. They have a much better idea of where the design is going and are far more confident that we are meeting their requirements. As a result, there are fewer client-driven changes later in the design and construction process.”

“In the old days, we would go into a client meeting and roll out the sketch paper,” said Brainerd. “Then we would go back to the office, try to interpret our own sketches, make revisions, then review the drawings again with the client to confirm that we understood their needs correctly. Now we project the model onto the wall and address 90 percent of their issues during the meeting, right in the model. Because many of our projects are design-build, the contractor is also present, contributing equally to the collaborative design process by raising constructability and cost issues. They develop an understanding from project inception of how the building is built, rather than being left to interpret and visualize our design intent from 2D drawings long after our work is done.”

Though the final output of their design process is 2D drawings, which remains the lingua franca on the job site, Smedley and Brainerd include an “800” series of drawings in every set that consists of three-dimensional views of the model. “We’ve only seen a benefit to adding three-dimensional images to the contract set,” said Brainerd. “Invariably, if questions arise on the job site, the super will point directly to a 3D image, not the orthogonal, scaled drawings. The views of the model result in fewer construction errors and fewer RFIs. We end up getting a built result that is much closer to our original design intent. We call it ‘building with confidence.’”