North East designers win down under

An International team, led by the North East-based BIM Academy has won a virtual design competition for a new convention centre in Sydney, Australia, ‘Build Sydney Live’. BIM Academy is a collaboration between Northumbria University and Ryder Architecture established in 2011 as an international centre of excellence for Building Information Modelling (BIM).

BIM is a digital process involving the coordinated development of smart data about a building project throughout its entire lifecycle. Based on use of 3D models, it allows the testing of a digital prototype in advance of its physical realisation. Building on its success in previous competitions, Build London Live and Build Qatar Live, BIM Academy brought together a strong team of building design professionals from various disciplines comprising of Ryder Architecture, Colour UDL Landscape and Northumbria University and AECOM from Australia who provided engineering, sustainability, visualisation and cost consultants.

They were supported by cloud based BIM software providers Kykloud and dRofus based in Newcastle and Oslo.

The BIM Academy team were the overall winners of the 48 hour competition. Entrants were given just two days to respond to the design brief using state of the art BIM and project technologies and submit their entries using a cloud-based collaboration portal provided by sponsors ASite.

During previous competitions teams have been collocated but for Build Sydney Live, 63 BIM Academy team members contributed from offices in eight cities in three countries using the latest collaboration and communication technologies using follow the sun working.

The challenging competition brief called for a convention centre on the Darling Harbour site in Sydney. The submissions were judged on sustainability, design excellence, collaborative working and innovative combined use of BIM technologies.

BIM Academy’s managing director, Peter Barker said: “Collaborating with our team of leading design, engineering and technology companies to produce such a comprehensive submission has been fantastic. Winning this competition cements our position as one of the world’s leading BIM research, education and consultancy organisations.”