CAD Tech News (#80)

▶ LACCD Sets BIM Standard on Largest Bond Construction Program in the U.S.

Bentley's connected data environment helps the Los Angeles Community College District save $12 million on complex sustainable building project.

By Aidan Mercer

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is the largest community college district in the United States, comprising nine colleges spanning 882 square miles. These colleges have educated more than 3 million students over the past 77 years, and they currently enroll more than 225,000 students annually, 80% of whom come from underserved populations.

LACCD received funding through taxpayer-approved bonds and the State of California to launch its BuildLACCD sustainable building project. With a goal to expand the capacity and efficiency of the school while targeting zero energy usage, the $6 billion project is modernizing and improving campus facilities to enhance opportunities for students from lower-income communities.

Beginning in the early 2000s, the bond programs called for designing and constructing more than 65 new buildings, as well as remodeling many others. The first two phases were traditional design–build projects, while the final phase of this ambitious campus transformation mandated a building information modeling (BIM) approach, requiring that each building be modeled in 3D and managed using BIM processes.

The construction program is intended to expand LACCD's capacity and efficiency, enabling the district to prepare more students for careers and/or transfer to four-year universities. Here, an image from LumenRT shows how people might move through a student union building.

Meeting the Mandate

The BuildLACCD project involved more than 500 participants covering nearly 1,000 different trades, conforming to different standards, and generating an exorbitant amount of project data. The LACCD team recognized that to meet the BIM mandate, they required a standardized digital design process. "We created BIM and spatial tools as a policy," commented Marcela Oliva, project manager for BuildLACCD.

For every design–build contract for new buildings or retrofits, building teams were required to follow BuildLACCD's rigorous BIM program, which demanded strict compliance with rules regarding workflow, information sharing, and early design collaboration. For spatial coordination, design and trade-specific models had to be integrated into a consolidated 3D model using specific BIM advancement technology.

LACCD's comprehensive BIM standards designated approved software for every function performed on the design–build projects, and required i-models for each building to incorporate all data and disciplines, improving coordination among multiple entities. (Bentley Systems i-models are specialized "containers" for exchanging infrastructure information.) Read more »

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Aidan Mercer is the industry marketing director for AEC at Bentley Systems.

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