Integrated Practice

by Michael Tardiff, Assoc. AIA
Contributing Editor

The challenge: Support the completion of a detailed Program Development Study (PDS) for the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), including detailed cost estimates organized in a modular format to allow consideration of multiple development options. An existing campus is slated to become the headquarters of a U.S. cabinet department on a site consisting of 61 buildings (many of which are historic) on 160 acres, 12 new buildings, and 4 new parking garages. Take into account such criteria as the department’s program requirements, historic preservation standards, rehabilitation of the existing buildings to meet current building codes including seismic codes, LEED® standards, and structural/security requirements for both new and existing buildings including blast resistance and progressive-collapse analysis. For the existing buildings, develop cost estimates for three design alternatives—historic preservation, gut rehab, and something in between—so that the GSA and interested stakeholders can evaluate relative costs and benefits. For the entire effort, produce sufficient, defensible documentation to support a request for congressional funding.

Oh, and complete the entire project in six weeks.

The GSA had previously retained a large national firm to conduct just such a study for a single new building on the same campus. That earlier study took eight months to complete and produced results that left the GSA without sufficient supporting documentation. For this new, broader assignment of staggering scope, the GSA turned to OLBN Architectural Services Inc., an eight-person firm in Rockville, Md., with a track record for managing the design and construction of complex government projects.

Impossible for an eight-person firm? Yes. OLBN’s secret—and talent—is an ability to marshal efficiently the resources of a large and diverse group of highly skilled expert consultants in the same way that the conductor of an orchestra synthesizes the talents of skilled musicians to create a symphony of sound. “Collaboration, courage, and competition are the drivers of OLBN’s success,” says Dianne Davis, founding principal of AEC Infosystems Inc., one of the firms that make up OLBN’s client-service, results-oriented team. “They are so completely into their clients’ business, they are perfectly poised to exploit BIM to its full potential.”

What is OLBN and how do they work?
“OLBN” is an acronym that stands for “online business network,” a phrase that sums up the vision of firm founder and principal Ruoke Chen, AIA. It is less a business strategy than a mindset; one that “allows a small firm to do very large projects,” notes Chen. Firm principal and partner Michael Kierzkowski adds: “We find the best people and team with them.” In addition to AEC Infosystems, which provides the firm with building information modeling expertise and muscle, OLBN has cultivated relationships with firms that range from small practices to multinational corporations, including Quinn|Evans Architects, experts in historic preservation; Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc., nationally recognized structural engineers; Hinman Consulting Engineering Inc., for blast-resistance analysis and design; Woods Peacock Engineering Consultants, structural engineers with specialized expertise in historic structures; META Engineers, P.C. MEP engineers; The Louis Berger Group Inc., environmental consultants; Thomas L. Brown Associates, P.C. local geotechnical experts; and last but certainly not least, Monument Construction Corporation, a frequent OLBN design-build partner, for construction cost estimating, construction management, and general contracting.

OLBN’s project management skill predates the firm’s use of BIM, the primary value of which Kierzkowski describes simply as “reducing the fear factor of taking on new and larger challenges.” Seventy to 80 percent of the firm’s work is for federal government clients such as the GSA, the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. To be successful in this market, Kierzkowski says, “you have to have a project manager mentality. We’re there to support the federal project manager, not just to complete our contract and get paid. We are always looking for ways to do things more quickly, more efficiently, to provide our clients with faster access to reliable information. BIM provides us with that access. We can leverage the information and manipulate it to make it useful. Our clients really value what they perceive as ‘extra stuff,’ which we perceive as part of our job. The way that ArchiCAD® allows us to enter information into a model and reuse it as needed is a perfect match with our business model.”

BIM to the rescue
The program development support documentation that OLBN completed for the GSA—on time—fills seven volumes, which take up nearly two feet of shelf space. The cost estimates included in the study are not ranges—they are calculated to the dollar, based on careful analysis of existing conditions, the program, and synthesis of all the (sometimes conflicting) criteria into detailed outline specifications. “We may not know precisely what the final building will look like, because it has yet to be designed,” says Kierzkowski. “But we can say with a very high degree of confidence that if you want, for example, a finished building of this size, to serve this purpose, restored or renovated to these standards, with infill and additions matching the historic character of the original, and meeting these other technical criteria, then it will cost you this amount to complete that project in today’s dollars.”

Chen is careful to note that “without the latest BIM technology, it would have been impossible for us to do this project in so short a time. We realized that we needed to use BIM to create a building model that could be priced.” Before awarding OLBN the contract for the PDS, GSA had previously commissioned Optira, a laser-scanning company, to document the existing buildings. The point-cloud data set was then converted into building information models by Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects of Princeton, N.J.

OLBN and AEC Infosystems imported these models into ArchiCAD using the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) format. Major building components such as walls, windows, and doors were converted into intelligent objects, which allowed the team to generate quantity take-offs directly from the building information model in Microsoft Excel format. OLBN then used the model to develop annotated schematic design drawings, prepare outline specifications, and generate digital 3D visualizations that describe the intended scope at a high level of detail. All of this information was then conveyed to Monument Construction for detailed cost estimating. Indeed, the schematic drawings contain so much information that they look constructable. For this reason, OLBN does not include them in the final deliverables, but does include dozens of visualizations from the BIM models, which are a tremendous help to GSA’s project managers in describing what the mountain of supporting data in the PDS represents.

The building information models contain “markers,” or hyperlinks, that link particular parts of the model directly to photographic images, digital visualizations, and the outline specifications. “It’s a fully integrated database,” notes Chen, “which isn’t actually part of our contractual obligation.”

It’s all about the client
OLBN’s venture into BIM began, as it does with many firms, with experimentation in conventional 3D modeling and visualization, using tools such as 3D Max and 3D Studio. They found that modeling and visualization alone enabled them to provide improved client service. Projects submitted to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) often have to be submitted multiple times before receiving approval, notes Kierzkowski. “Because of our approach, and our appreciation of the CFA’s and NCPC’s responsibility to understand the impact of new projects, we often earn approval for our projects on the first submission.” In one particular case, adds Chen, the 3D visualizations were so detailed that the review panel “asked why we were seeking approval for the project after it had already been built.”

What will happen to the rich data that OLBN has gathered to support the PDS? Ideally, it would be used by the firms who are awarded the contracts for the actual design of the buildings. “Right now, there is no [contractual] vehicle for the GSA to contract for a BIM model,” notes Kierzkowski. “Our primary deliverable is our written report. We will also deliver the models as an added deliverable, but because we will no longer be managing them, we will have to disclaim responsibility for them. But the models are still of tremendous added value to the client and give the GSA the opportunity to transfer this information to others in the future.”

Copyright 2007 Michael Tardif, reprinted with permission.