Assignment B1 - Group B - Nick Pawlikowski

From 2007 to 2012, BIM adoption in North America jumped from 28% to 71%, and contractors are adopting BIM faster than Architects, according to a BIM SmartMarket report by McGraw Hill Construction. ^[1] Contractors that adopted BIM at a deeper level saw a better return on investment from their initial adoption.  They also cited reduced errors and omissions and reduced rework as major project benefits of BIM adoption.  It was concluded in the report that contractors will continue to drive BIM innovation, as opposed to architects or engineers.  McGraw Hill suggested that contractors should pursue new technologies in order to increase the value of their BIM investment, as well as to push the industry forward.  BIM helped contractors to improve project efficiency through increased collaboration, standardization of deliverables and refining workflows that could be repeated from project to project.  Currently, contractors see the next innovation lying in ways to bring BIM models to the field through mobile platforms.  Many in the building industry are also interested in ways to integrate BIM with 3D printing technology.

At its most basic, 3D printing is a manufacturing process where material is applied in layers to form a 3D object.  This is known as an additive process.  Several types of 3D printing have been developed that use different materials and methods of printing.  Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is a process by which hot thermoplastic is extruded out of a nozzle into layers to form a 3D object.  Stereolithography uses UV lasers to solidify layers of photopolymer, a liquid that hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light.  Multi-jet modeling uses spray binder to bond layers of powder together into a 3D object, and can support multiple colors of powder for manufacturing multicolored objects. ^[2] 

3D printing has largely been used as a rapid prototyping method and not for mass manufacturing.  However, this is starting to change.  Some parts for tools, toys, cars and airplanes are manufactured using 3D printing.  Medical components such as prosthetics can also be made using 3D printing.  Electronic circuits can be printed in 3D into rigid or flexible configurations.  Some of the anticipated future innovations in 3D printing include printed electronics from plans, printing tissue and organs for medical use, and printing building components.

In the practice of Architecture, 3D printing is widely used to make models but not extensively used to construct buildings.  However, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill has been investigating 3D printing for use in the building industry, and has shown their interest by completing the Additive Manufacturing and Integrated Energy demonstration project, a building constructed primarily with parts made from additive manufacturing.  One of the biggest benefits of 3D printing the structure was the tight integration of its enclosure and structural components, leading to very efficient use of material.  Arup is also investigating additive manufacturing.  The company used 3D printing combined with structural analysis and parametric modelling to create “nodes” that connected members of a tensegrity structure.  At the end of the design process, the final node was 75% lighter and half the height of the conventionally fabricated node they started with.  Arup demonstrated that 3D printing can help firms make for efficient use of materials when designing structural components. ^[3]

Todd Desmarais, a director at Gensler, predicts that the technology to construct a fully 3D printed building is at least a decade away.  However, in the meantime additive manufacturing can solve a variety of problems and inefficiencies that occur in the building industry.

An exciting example of 3D printing of structures has occurred not in the States, but in Europe.  An Amsterdam based 3D printing company, MX3D, has teamed up with designer Joris Laarman to design and construct a steel bridge in the heart of Amsterdam.  MX3D developed a multi-axis robotic 3D printer that can form structural steel components in midair, as well as forming support structures for itself so it can operate continuously.  The 3D printer welds small increments of fast-setting steel to previous increments to create strong structures quickly in an additive method.  Laarman believes that this method draws nearer to the future of building structures digitally and locally. ^[4]

This method provides insight on the problem with 3D printing in construction of having to set up and move supports for 3D printers.  In the future, perhaps the 3D printers will begin on the ground and create their own scaffolding as they need to during construction.

In Egla Qori's blog post, she mentioned that the 3D printing of concrete for building construction has begun to be experimented with.  She said that its innovative method of forming concrete allowed the creation of shapes difficult to achieve with typical formwork construction, such as curved structures.  This led me to think about how innovations in 3D printing could lead to the imaginations of artists and architects being translated to the actual built product more easily, and unique architectural forms could become more prevalent and accessible.

Reading Maria Raggousis' blog post on the advantages of BIM made me realize that I had skimmed over what is perhaps the most obvious benefit of BIM: the ease of collaboration and synchronization of the design process across disciplines.  For example, when I was a structural engineering co-op at EwingCole, I witnessed the introduction of a workflow that took the Revit models of the Architecture, Structural, and MEP departments and laid them on top of one another in order to run a clash detection program.  From the very beginning of the modelling process to the finalization of construction documents, meetings were held where the clash detection results were analyzed and members of each department discussed how to resolve the clashes in the best way.

While reading Maissoun Ksara's blog post about masonry-laying drones and having Maria's post on BIM fresh in my mind, I began thinking about how future innovations in BIM could involve internalizing various construction methods in the BIM code in such a way that, as a building model is refined, the optimal methods of construction could be specified and communicated to the contractor.  For example, if a masonry wall is modeled in BIM, the program could analyze it, determine if it is able to be constructed via drones, and create a pattern file of the wall that can be used directly by the drones in the field.  This kind of consistency across design and construction software could tighten the workflow required for burgeoning construction methods like bricklaying drones.

CITATIONS:

[1]       Bottari, T. (2014, January 23). The Global State of BIM: Current Market Data [Web log post]. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from https://www.aconex.com/blogs/2014/01/global-state-of-bim-construction-market-data.html

[2]       Hoffman, T. (2016, January 04). 3D Printing: What You Need to Know. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394720,00.asp

[3]       Gonchar, J. (2016, May 1). Continuing Education: 3-D Printing. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from http://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/11652--d-printing

[4]       Starr, M. (2015, June 15). Gravity-defying 3D printer to print bridge over water in Amsterdam. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from https://www.cnet.com/news/gravity-defying-3d-printer-to-print-bridge-over-water-in-amsterdam/