£41m BCU construction scheme nominated for global award
A £41m university campus project in Birmingham has been nominated for a worldwide award that praises the use of innovative technologies in the construction industry.
The 10,500m² building currently taking shape on Birmingham City University’s City South Campus on Westbourne Road has been shortlisted in the Construction (Large Building) category of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Excellence Awards.
The new building is being created by BAM Construction and forms part of the university’s investment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.
Among several innovations incorporated in to the development, the university and BAM have utilised building information modelling (BIM) across cloud-based mobile technologies on the construction and design stages to reduce costs and save time.
Accessing data simultaneously on an iPad while out on site or back in the office on the web-portal provides visibility for all stakeholders and allows for instant notifications in real time.
This has enabled location co-ordinates to be captured digitally, reducing human error, as points are only recorded once. On this project, the time taken to produce and record information traditionally would have taken approximately 11 hours, whereas the technique developed has condensed the time to around just 10 minutes.
Furthermore, the collaboration has reduced the necessity and added costs of having a second surveyor on site assisting the principal site surveyor.
Staff from the university’s Estates and Facilities Management division have teamed up with academics from the institution’s School of Engineering and the Built Environment alongside BAM Construction in a unique partnership that has seen these innovations implemented within the build process.
Richard Draper, the university’s BIM Process Manager, said: “Through our projects we have adopted self-developed and self-proven cutting edge practices in BIM, which has led to some excellent research and publications by our academics in the School of Engineering and the Built Environment.
“The City South Development Project is one of the latest in a breed of projects being run at a level of BIM which prove to be better than any before. We are fortunate enough to be working in partnership with BAM – one of the earliest adopters of BIM and the UK – and with their involvement we will succeed to a level not seen elsewhere in the industry to date.”
Designed by Sheppard Robson, the new four-storey building will be equipped with a suite of laboratories, ultrasound facilities and specialist teacher training rooms.
It will also enable the relocation of the university’s School of Education, consolidating the Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences on to one site in 2017.
Winners in the AEC Excellence Awards will be announced on November 16 at a ceremony in Las Vegas.
