Exploring an IPD Project and a Viewpoint by Graphisoft's new CEO

IPD or “integrated project delivery” is fast becoming the newest buzzword in the AEC industry after BIM, which has moved on from dominating the industry discourse for the last five years to becoming almost as commonplace as the term CAD. IPD, on the other hand, is a term that started being widely used only last year and is rapidly gaining in momentum, to the extent that it is now becoming a focal point of many AEC vendors’ product pitches. A case in point was the article on “Collaboration, Project Management, and Project Information Management Solutions in AEC” that was published last month, in which two of the three solutions profiled had IPD listed as a critical component of their offerings. While IPD is still more of a goal than a reality for most of the AEC industry, there are a few ground-breaking projects that are already using this new collaboration and delivery method. I recently had the opportunity to learn about a large IPD project and even got some first-hand experience of how the IPD process works by attending one of its collaborative review meetings. AECbytes starts off this month with a case study of this project, the Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley, and explores how the IPD approach is being used for it.

The Viewpoint series returns this month with an article by Viktor Varkonyi, Graphisoft's new CEO, who looks at BIM collaboration between the different A/E design disciplines from a software developer's perspective. Also on the agenda is a review of the new version of Solibri Model Checker, which can analyze Building Information Models for design integrity, quantities, accessibility, constructability, and code compliance, and which was also one of the applications used in the Sutter Medical Center IPD project.

Last but not the least, the Tips and Tricks section this month features a tutorial on how to render convincing 3D grass in a reasonable time-frame in 3ds Max Design 2009, and another tutorial that shows how to create a collage of exploded views in ArchiCAD.

Do continue to check out the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get a consolidated view of all the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > March 2009