ACE Seminar

So I'm sitting here in the Fiesta Inn, in Tempe listening to all these presentations about BIM. For the most part the discussions have been centered around the contractor or the sub-contractor. One subject in particular as hit home with me. How do you share the BIM model? To me it depends largely on how the project is contracted. If you're talking about a CM at risk contract then responsibility for sharing the BIM model becomes a little gray. The architect may not want to share the model with the contractor because they may feel they're doing part of the contractors job. Even if the architect does share the model, the contractor may not want it because it wasn't modeled to a contractors specifications. In other words the contractor is going to want to extract information from the model that the architect may not have modeled. For example, the architect may not model the footings or foundation walls. He or she may decide it's not worth modeling and just pick up that information in a detail view. This will not be acceptable for the contractor. The contractor can't use the information that isn't there. If however the contract is written as a design build, where the contractor is driving the boat, they can dictate to the architect how the model should be built. They can do this because in this case the architect is under contract with the contractor. I'm not sure what the solution is, but knowing these discussions are taking place makes me hopeful for the future.