Façade for Westfield Parramatta Transport Interchange Named
Top Project in “Building: BIM for Building Engineering” Category
Exton, Pa. – Arup, a leading global design and business consulting firm, has won a 2006 BE Award for its Façade for Westfield Parramatta Transport Interchange project. The award category was "Building: BIM for Building Engineering."
The BE Awards of Excellence, which are selected by an independent jury of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world’s infrastructure. These projects set benchmarks for their industries, and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them.
Westfield Parramatta, the largest shopping center in Sydney, Australia, contains more than 350 retail shops and a cinema complex. The center’s extension features an 11-screen cinema complex, an underground link to the adjoining train station, a colonnade restaurant and café precinct, and more than 70 new shops.
Arup provided detailed façade engineering design and fabrication documentation of the glass and secondary support steel. The 110-meter-long by 20-meter-high façade consists of 2425 square meters of bolted steel and glass, including a glazed footbridge spanning 21 meters that links the new and existing complexes.
Arup estimates that its use of Bentley’s Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions on this project saved AUD$270,000 due to error-free fabrication and installation. Some 550 glass panels plus support steelwork were coordinated, detailed, and installed without error and on time. In addition, automated production of documentation for the glass panels saved Arup roughly three man-weeks in time as compared with conventional approaches to documentation.
The bolted glass façade features a series of frameless glass panels, fixed back to horizontal transom box sections with patch fittings at each corner and at midspan. These transoms are then fixed to radial mullions with connections back to the primary building structure.
A section through the building revealed that the geometry of the façade was described by an upper radius, a step back into the building, and then a lower radius. A plan view showed that the geometry was further complicated by two bends along the length of the façade to keep within the site boundary. This resulted in the glass panel becoming nonrectilinear in elevation where a joint line occurred. Adjacent to the main façade is a vertical cylindrical façade, and a return wall connects this to the main façade.
Arup had to maintain a constant vertical joint width, which meant the nonrectilinear panels all had slightly different top and bottom lengths.
The design, glazing installation, and secondary steelwork for the façade had to be completed within six months so the cinema could be fitted out. This all had to be done while also accommodating the lead-in time required to manufacture and deliver the glass from an overseas plant.
Using MicroStation’s DGN file format, Arup could easily share information with its design partners. This enabled a highly coordinated secondary steelwork model, which was installed without error. Coordination was carried out in a 3D environment, facilitating an understanding of the errors and omissions throughout the design team.
By extracting production drawings from the 3D model, Arup could produce extra drawings as required. This ensured that the complex geometries and connections could be easily understood. By modeling the glass panels in Bentley Structural, Arup could ensure a correct size and location. This information could then be extracted and presented to the glass fabricator in a table format, which is more appropriate for its manufacturing processes. The automatic extraction of this information also eliminated rekeying errors.
The workflow that Bentley Structural and MicroStation provide allows Arup to simultaneously produce a rich 3D model and standard 2D documentation. Moreover, the 3D model can be interrogated in a number of ways, providing a broad spectrum of information for use by various members of the design team.
For more information on Arup’s winning project and all of the other 2006 BE Award projects, visit www.be.org/awards. For more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit www.bentley.com/bim.
About Arup
Arup is a leading global firm of designers, engineers, planners, and business consultants providing a diverse range of professional services to clients around the world.
Through its innovative and fully integrated approach, which brings its full complement of skills and knowledge to bear on any given design problem, Arup exerts a significant influence on the built environment. It is the creative force behind many of the world’s most innovative and sustainable designs.
The firm has over 7000 staff working in 70 offices in more than 30 countries. At any one time, it has over 10,000 projects running concurrently.
Arup has three main global business areas – buildings, infrastructure, and consulting – although its multidisciplinary approach means that any given project may involve people from any or all of the sectors or regions in which it operates. Its fundamental aim is to bring together the best professionals in the world to meet its clients’ needs. For more information, visit www.arup.com.
About the BE Conference
The BE Conference, which consistently scores a 99 percent attendee satisfaction rating, is a once-a-year learning opportunity for Bentley users and their managers offering professional training, technology updates, keynotes, and best practice sharing. At these sessions, attendees better themselves, better their organizations, and better the ways they can improve the world’s infrastructure.
About Bentley
Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With 2005 revenues of $336 million and more than 2000 colleagues around the world, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top 500 Design Firms and major owner-operators and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.
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