A New BIMsness Model?

According to David Celento in his Article "Innovate or Perish" (Harvard Design Review 27), in a business as usual working relationship, BIM could actually be harmful for architects.

In the USA at least, big customers like the General Services Administration (equivalent to Canada's Public Works and Government Services) have become wise to the increases in predictability and error detection inherent in a BIM process and are now requiring at least a partial BIM model for all Federally funded buildings. "Their experience is a reduction in change orders saving the GSA up to 10% of total construction costs."p.4  So for a 10 million dollar building that is an average of 1 million dollars of savings.

While it is great that this new technology is being embraced and seen as a source of value by owners and building managers, they don't seem willing to pay extra for it, and it really does take a lot more work to produce a detailed BIM model.  As one high ranking civil servant put it:   “Architects are paid to provide buildings without errors, why should they be paid more to do this?”

Umm, maybe because our market rate fees are based on a common practice model that does not involve this extra work?

But more work and less profit are only two of the three dangers that Celento warns may come with BIM.  Because sophisticated clients are now expecting increased error reduction, when errors due occur they are even more flabbergasted and prone to placing liability on the architect.  It could make architects even more on the line for errors, omissions, and general construction site chaos.

It's not all grim though.

Celento points to the potential inherent in owning the rights to BIM models.  While in the GSA projects the client demands exclusive ownership of the final model (which I assume comes from a security paranoia perspective) if the architect were to retain ownership of the design (which I understand we do in Canada) and the contract documents (which would be the BIM file, and which are also owned by us in Canada) then one would have a half finished project ready to be deployed for another client.  If BIMming requires way more front end work, then we may as well reuse as much of that work as possible.  As well, with the parametric setup of many BIM programs, tweaking of room sizes etc. could be a fairly easy process.

I could see this being especially useful or valuable with custom homes.  With a series of base models to pick from, customers could more or less take an off the rack design, adjust it to fit their space needs, and then parametrics could be used to fit it to the site.  The construction documents could be produced more or less automatically and then bam, you have a semi-bespoke home ready for construction.  The product would be less custom than a fully tailored suit, but way more unique than standardised tract homes.  It would be the design equivalent of a Freitag bag.

link to the article (highlights are not mine):  http://workgroups.clemson.edu/AAH0503_ANIMATED_ARCH/M.Arch%20Studio%20Documents/STUDIO_Innovate%20or%20Perish.pdf