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Introduction

The Bridge Academy in the east London borough of Hackney is a seven storey, terraced building on a small site.  The academy's focus is on mathematics and music and the building was designed to encourage students to think about the relationship between maths and music and use the structure of the building as a learning tool.  The "heart" of the building is suspended to provide maximum flexibility within the building allowing the Academy to change and adapt to future needs.

Use of Building Information Modelling
As the project design was begun over four years ago, BIM technology was in its early stages.  Therefore the procurement of the supply chain did not include a requirement for previous experience using a BIM.  The Design and Build Contract enabled the team to come together at a sufficiently early stage to ensure that the BIM can be used by all members of the team.  The client saw no reason to take a detailed interest in the technical design as they trusted that the builders and designers would work well together and the team were contractually obliged to deliver a specified quality standard for a fixed cost by a fixed time.

The tool was used to model "pinch points" where the interfaces of mechanical and engineer services were particularly difficult.  The benefit of this was that it helped to identify issues in the design which could then be rectified with little delay to the project.  Although a full BIM model was not implemented, it demonstrated that BIM can be used in specific areas to overcome specific problems. 

Conclusions
The team have been extremely pleased with the final building and have received good feedback from the Head Teacher.  The students are proud of their new school and is has helped to regenerate the area.  The team agree that due to the complicated design the building would have been extremely difficult and time consuming (hence expensive) without the use of the BIM.  The success of this project enabled BDP to promote the use of BIM both to their internal team and also their present and future clients.  They were also awarded a Bentley BE Award for the Best Use of BIM.  The team have gone on to use BIM throughout future projects. 

Key Lessons

• One of the concerns that the design team had over using the new technology was the issue of design responsibility for the model.  To overcome this, the designers maintained the model as a design tool.  The model was then passed on to the fabricators "For Information Only".  The steel suppliers imported the model into their own 3D steelwork detailing package, Tekla X Steel.  The feedback from the steel suppliers was positive as they felt that it aided communication between the teams.
• As BDP offer an inter-disciplinary service the different teams were able to work together to overcome difficulties with the technology and understood the drivers for each individual team.  BDP now has BIM representatives in each team so that there is expert knowledge across the firm.
• The team experienced issues with software compatibility and interfacing between different teams.  In some cases the 3D model had to be downgraded to 2D to interface with different formats.  The team had to work with software vendors to explain the functionality they needed.  This has helped the technology to move forward and enable future projects to use BIM more extensively.

Material Available on this Demonstration Project

The Bridge Academy, Hackney Case Study (March 2009)