Lord Coe recounts how London won the bid to host the games of 2012.  He discusses how the design and construction industry will be crucial in ensuring that London successfully develops the critical infrastructure, delivers the greatest games ever, and leaves a positive legacy in the built environment.

“Change has started to manifest itself in the profession… now we are really shifting gear towards another generation which will have an enormous impact on how we ultimately design a better built environment…with design tools that have not been known previously.”

“[We] don’t pick up technology just because it’s there, it has to be appropriate… BIM as an idea has been around for a long time… and technology is coming of age rapidly.  …In the early design stages what we really look for and depend on is the idea of agility – we have to be very light on our feet. So there are other ways of approaching BIM…”

“For key building systems] the added technology, and the added design input, that comes through the computer software and the ability to exchange our design information with the contractor is incredibly important because it helps that [fabrication] process work more smoothly, more effectively, more efficiently, less prone to problems on site…. It’s made my job as an architect many fold easier that it otherwise could ever have been…it frees me up to do what I’m good at, which is designing. ”

"We’ve found multiple benefits from going to a BIM solution…savings of time, we’ve been able to investigate design solutions better, and ultimately give our client a better product. Everybody that was [our BIM] team wouldn’t dream of going back to a 2D environment."

“We find that we can deliver drawn information much faster using BIM … we also use it to speak to our analysis packages… [to be] much more efficient testing different structural options … the contractor can use the BIM for fabrication of the structure, which speeds the fabrication process… All in all we find BIM benefits us right the way through the design process and into construction.”

“After a few months of using [BIM] we rapidly came to the conclusion that 3d was just the simplest way of doing [structural design and engineering] for every case…it turned out to be much easier.  It’s made huge benefits to our business.  Where we used to have 4 technicians on a project, now we’ll have 2…  We can share information much more easily between disciplines with our company… [and] also with people outside, architects, other service engineers, developers, contractors – so we work more efficiently internally and externally.”

“When we use BIM we can reduce the risks to ourselves [and] communicate in an enhanced way in our own practice, through disciplines, and also to the wider design team.  As time progresses the practice will probably predominately only work in BIM environment.”

“The benefits are obvious for design, the design teams are able to collaborate better, they have a better quality of information available to them off the system. During the constriction period we expect to get a number of benefits…[it] should drastically improve how we handle requests for information.  …. By using this approach and technology there will be considerable benefits in speed … and auditability.”

“We are developing a city with a city…in excess of 50 different contractors, 200 consultancies…in excess of 1600 acres…with design teams scattered across the globe…and approaching 300,000 individual documents…we chose to [work this way] because of the sheer scale of what we are involved with, and the sheer impossibility of trying to handle it in any [other way]”

“We are currently very serious about BIM… we’re looking at how we produce information, how we create, and then how we communicate that.  We’re looking for efficiency…in order to give us more time for design, more time for decision making – that enables better architecture.”

“[We are] using computer software and specially developed tools to be able to produce better buildings which are more cost effective, better quality of view, just overall work better and offer better value for money.  This gives us a huge range of benefits – we do things quicker, we do them more accurately so we can work with the right information from the beginning.  And it means that we have a very much better opportunity to optimize the designs.

“Our philosophy…is bringing everybody together in collaborative integrated team in order to achieve wonderful environments.  The holy grail we’ve been looking for is Building Information Modeling”