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The Summer of BIM (Tech Trends Column)
April 1, 2008 By: Kenneth WongA counterculture design festival breaks down the usual barriers.
What if one summer — or in this case, winter — a bunch of idealistic architects, designers, building owners, contractors, and consultants decided to do away with the professional hierarchies, business protocols, and legal constraints that have long prevented them from working together? What if they converged on a destination and simply spent the day exchanging ideas about the high-rises, hospitals, firehouses, and schools they envision building there?
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The Woodstock of BIM (building information modeling), as the organizers prefer to call it, took place this winter (figure 1). On January 31, soon after sunrise, 133 individuals from Boston, Maryland, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and elsewhere (http://bimstorm.com/LAX/play) began to transform the 60 city blocks east of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles (figure 2). A day later, they left behind 420 buildings, encompassing 54,755,153 square feet. Perhaps the most astonishing number is the total mileage traveled by the participants: zero.
 Figure 1. The Woodstock-inspired poster for BIMStorm LA. |
How could this be? Because the 24-hour design fest took place in virtual space, courtesy of Onuma Planning System (OPS), a Web-based BIM collaboration platform.
 Figure 2. The 50-million-square-foot area east of Dodger Stadium was the focus of BIMStorm LA. |
The Fruits of a Dream
When Kimon Onuma founded his architecture practice in 1988 in Pasadena, California, he was following in the footsteps of his father, who began his Tokyo architectural firm in 1972. Onuma sincerely believes the building industry is ripe for a revolution. In December 2007, he had the idea for a free event that would bring together a cross-section of the industry. He dubbed it BIMStorm LA.
For the event to succeed, he figured it needed several crucial elements:
- 1. It had to be conducted in real time.
- 2. It had to be hosted via the Inter- net (so people could see one another's ideas).
- 3. It should have no lag time (so an architect wouldn't have to wait two weeks after he or she had submitted something to get feedback).
- 4. It had to be based on open and interoperable data standards (figure 3).
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