Best Job in the World? Chris Linning talks about working alongside Sydney’s Opera House!

I wanted to keep today’s last post short and simple.

So you’ve heard of the saying ‘what you see is what you get’. I think this quote pretty much sums up today’s final lecture on ‘The role of IT and BIM in FM/Operations’.

BIM technology on Sydney’s Opera House

You can pretty much guess as to why I enjoyed today’s lecture, and this is because it will be my final post to my blog! Chris Linning was privileged enough to be involved in the management of the Sydney Opera House and currently working as the manger of building information. He mentioned that Sydney’s Opera House attracts an approximate 8.2 million tourists and visitors a year, along with 2400 performances inside the building. Now, you would think how on earth does one maintain and sustain the livelihood of Sydney’s most iconic landmark? To answer that question, the CRC uses BIM technology to efficiently improve the maintenance and care of facilities management of the Opera House.

So we already know that we use BIM technology to enable us with the assistance and man

agement of a building, but what happens after a building is completed? Another food for thought Chris mentioned is all that buildings just like humans go through a cycle. Most buildings go through the stages from construction through to demo

lition, however what Facilities Management focuses on is preserving a building as long as possible. Renovation or just improving the efficiency of buildings can be done so that just like we humans, buildings have a longer lifespan. I think another valuable point Chris mentioned, is that the average life span of a building is approximately 40 years in the keeping. Sydney’s Opera House is currently celebrating its very own 40^th birthday and like everyone else, I will be expecting the extravagant festivals and carnivals later in the year. This proves that the use of IT and BIM in the maintenance of buildings, you can definitely expect future buildings to outlive their time-ticking years. In fact, Linning remarked that he believes the Opera House still has another 200 years to go. I’m actually not sure how I feel about a building that will outlast myself. Below is a documentary of the evolution of the Sydney Opera House.

Finally my last ever blog post done and dusted. Although in this last post, I still struggled to wrap my head around the ‘How to: Blog’ idea, but I think I’ve finally got the gist of these. This semester has taught me a lot about technology, and has given me a new outlook of IT within the building industry. Hopefully, I made my point across in all of my posts and most importantly you enjoyed reading my first ever blog.

Toodle,

CHANEL

IT and Cost in Planning, 5D: Creating Cost Certainty

If you asked me what property surveying was about eight months ago, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue. I initially thought cost planning and quantity surveying played a minor role in the building process and management, but boy was I wrong. Luckily for me, Caitlin Hintz from Mitchell Brandtman gave us a quick debrief on the role of quantity surveyors and cost estimating within the building industry.

When you first think of cost estimating, what usually come to mind are numbers and calculations, and lets all face it, nobody enjoys maths. However quantity surveying was more than what really meets the eye. It wasn’t just you and your computer in an office building, calculating cost and adding numbers. Caitlin made it seem much much more than that, and she intrigued us by going through two case study, she herself had worked on.

The project Riverquay in Queensland was a $10 million project value, a case where 5D software was incorporated into the development. To no surprise, the software BIM was used through the visualization process of the plan. Caitlin introduced another software known as Cost X, which is a 3D BIM software and 2D estimating package, which allowed you to visualized costing and quantities. Click on the video below for a quick demo of the program.

Another benefit of using Cost X is that it reduces the amount of time it takes to retrieve and calculate cost and quantity. The Solibri Model Checker is another visual software that basically reports clashes made by engineers and architects. I was thinking to myself, what if we had our own Model Checker that reported clashes between timetables in our daily lives. This would minimise so much potential problems, in reality and most importantly in the building process. At this stage I thought to myself, there must be some sort of catch to it, but in this case there were no strings attached.

Finally, Caitlin went on to discuss the four main stages of 5D designs, into developing a final product. It goes about something like this; so you have LOD100, which basically revolves around the concept and design stage, and then you have the final stage LOD 500, where final changes and replacements are made to the fabrication of the design.

Bringing it altogether, I would say that it was definitely hard to absorb everything said in this presentation. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was still in holiday mode, or the fact that I was too distracted by the lack of sleep I had the night before. However what I took from today’s lecture was that you have got to have some sort of patience in dealing with quantity surveying and as far as I’m concerned, patience does not exist in my vocabulary.