GSA signs agreement to open advanced design software

The General Services Administration's Public Building Service recently signed an agreement with three international real estate organizations to open standards on architectural software that will allow the agency to design buildings to take into account factors such as energy use and how the building will be affected by climate.

The agreement, the first of its kind, will allow GSA to work with any engineering and architectural firm in the world to use the same technology to design buildings, called Building Information Modeling. GSA signed the agreement with Finland's Senate Properties, the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority, and Norway's Directorate of Public Construction and Property, all of which have agreed to support open standards. The agreement with foreign nations is important because GSA owns and manages properties worldwide.

BIM, also called virtual design and construction, is a process through which architects and engineers virtually design and construct a building before breaking ground. As opposed to two-dimensional blueprints or more conventional 3-D design programs, BIM allows users to reach unprecedented levels of complexity in their models. These models can take into account a virtually unlimited amount of factors, including energy use, cost, environment and climate.

Virtual design and construction is similar to the way auto and aerospace industries design and test cars or jets before fully fabricating them, said Charles Matta, director of federal buildings and modernizations for GSA's Public Building Service. "The same thing is happening in construction," he said. "We can now virtually design and construct buildings before digging the soil."

The increasing complexity of building requirements caused by the increasing importance of telecommunications, security and other factors on design was a reason for the shift towards virtual modeling. "The design and construction community is embarking on designs that are a lot more complex," Matta said. "Without BIM, we can't deliver those types of facilities."

Matta said BIM helps architectural and engineering firms deliver plans, and cost and structural information much quicker and more accurately than was possible before because BIM takes into account variables that could delay projects. BIM can calculate energy use, for example, by taking into account the number of people who will be in the building, outside temperatures, the time the building is in use, and other factors. Matta said the added complexity can reduce unexpected delays, reducing both cost and construction time.

GSA was able to close the agreement with the three countries because it wanted to embrace BIM technology, not choose one design and engineering platform that would force engineering firms to support if they wanted to do business with the agency. GSA has pushed open standards and interoperability with BIM software, going as far as inviting the leading software developers to its offices to ask them to develop an open standard.

"We gave them all the same task: Do this exercise and convert the output to an open standard so we can compare," Matta said. "They all delivered it … [and] even then, there was a very high level of accuracy between them."

Encouraged that an open standard could be developed, GSA communicated with its equivalent agencies in Finland, Norway and the Netherlands and learned that they too wanted open standards, which led to the formulation of the agreement. GSA is still pursuing similar agreements with several other nations.