If there was a top-10 list of overused terms, “paradigm shift” would surely be on it. When a company or organization confronts major change, it’s often called a paradigm shift. But how often does this mean a transformation of the rules of the game? The architecture/engineering/construction (AEC) industry has no worries on this score—it truly is undergoing a paradigm shift. Its rules are changing profoundly, thanks to the advent of computerized 3-D design, otherwise known as building information modeling (BIM).
BIM has come a long way from five or six years ago when HEALTHCARE DESIGN started covering it. As BIM emerged, its principal application seemed to be in MEP clash detection. Because MEP has always accounted for a significant portion of the construction budget, the joke at the time was that MEP contractors were finally asserting their “control” of the design process.
For sure, the relative relationships of the A’s, E’s, and C’s in AEC continue to rebalance as use of BIM evolves—some have even gone so far as to say that the C’s are leading the way: Online newsletter AECbytes, reporting from this year’s Autodesk Revit AEC Technology Day, noted that “AutoDesk is finding that the use of BIM is gaining unprecedented momentum among contractors—they are currently leading the value chain and are the biggest beneficiaries of BIM.”
As vendors such as Autodesk Revit, Vectorworks, Rhinoceros 3-D, and form-Z grow in market acceptance, are the C’s—and, for that matter, the E’s—taking over for the A’s in healthcare design?
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