“I’ve always been quite interested in keeping up with what’s happening on a technical front,” said Nick Lawrence, a practice director at A&Q Partnership in London. The architect, who studied engineering in undergraduate school, leads the building information modeling (BIM) effort at A&Q Partnership and says his studies greatly influenced his interest in information modeling.
His interest extends beyond personal. Relying on BIM framework has been crucial for A&Q Partnership, who work on large, multi-building commercial and residential projects.
“It’s pretty evident that BIM is the next evolution in software,” he said. “There’s an inherent logic in having a 3D model and producing information from it. It feels efficient and sensible.”
One of the firm’s recent projects, a residential build in Watford, UK, contains six separate buildings; BIM greatly simplified and hastened the project, Lawrence said.
Coordinating Six Buildings
With claims of “Manhattanizing” Watford, which is just outside of London, the Eight Gardens project will deliver over 1,200 new homes to the burgeoning area. Alongside plans for a primary school and community amenities like a dentist’s office, the development is part of a much larger modernization of this rural area, according to the Watford Borough Council. The project is for Berkeley Homes, one of the largest housing developers in Europe.
To optimize file performance with so much geometry in a 6-building project, the A&Q team created one Vectorworks file for each of the six buildings, then referenced those files into a master file.
“For coordinating changes, you have to manage them from each building file then update the link in the master file,” Lawrence said. “It means that when one person makes a change, it’s then changed across the entire suite of drawings. I think it does save us quite a lot of time and, perhaps more importantly, it controls and limits people from making changes on a whim.”
One of the key aspects of A&Q’s BIM process is relegating detail-heavy work to the in-progress design files and only including necessary information and geometry in the master file.
“I think there’s a risk where people get too caught up with modeling,” Lawrence said. “It’s about understanding what actually needs to be modeled.”
To keep each building consistent in terms of architectural expression, the A&Q team set up class structures and naming conventions in Uniclass 2015. It starts with the master file, which branches off into a library folder containing standard resources and details, then there are individual project folders below the library folders. The resources in the library folders can be easily referenced into the project folders, which gives the project a strict uniformity.
“Particularly for a job this size, it’s important to control data across all the buildings,” Lawrence explained. “They’re all different buildings but there are certain details we want to be the same across all of them.”
BIM Framework — A Clever Way to Collaborate
BIM use wasn’t mandated for this project, but Lawrence and the team at A&Q Partnership helped collaborators through the BIM process anyway. A&Q rely on BIM for all their projects.
“We offered to develop it as a BIM job despite it not being contractually required, partly to help others in the learning process in adopting,” Lawrence said, touching on how BIM is becoming required more and more in the UK for public projects.
For the Eight Gardens project, A&Q worked with a landscape architect to finalize the landscaped elements, such as amenity spaces and shared gardens accessed exclusively by private residences. There are also large, publicly accessed landscaped steps, squares, and streets throughout the site at ground level.
Successful BIM hinges on what’s done before design work even starts. A&Q worked with the landscape architecture team to set expectations and file exchange protocols. Later in the design process, A&Q would reference the landscape architects’ .dwg and .ifc files into Vectorworks, which allowed the architects to make informed decisions about the landscape elements and how they affect the building elements.
Getting to Know A&Q Partnership
Founded in 1984, UK-based A&Q Partnership has around 60 staff members across four offices and is led by nine directors and six associates. They work on a variety of architectural project types including residential, workplace, retail, hospitality, data center, banking, and mixed-use schemes. They specialize in large urban regeneration projects, though have also demonstrated capability on small developments both residential and commercial.