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Designing a Greener Building with BIM
Building information modeling and sustainable design analysis.
By John F. Kennedy

Adoption of the LEED standard is growing. With many building owners and operators now requiring that their new building projects achieve LEED certification, it is important for architects to perform faster and more accurate energy analysis in the early stages of building design.

As one might imagine, complex engineering analyses of architectural design decisions are critical to achieving LEED certification. Many design firms outsource this engineering analysis, as it is time consuming and costly to do in-house. Now, design innovation technology tools, combined with the building information modeling (BIM) process, can provide robust design models containing the necessary level of detail for analyses.

Pertinent design data can now be readily extracted from the building information model and input to various analysis programs. With analysis tools such as the Green Building Studio Web service, this process has been streamlined such that architects can perform initial energy, water and carbon emission analyses in-house (and online, no less), improving the end result while reducing the overall cost of the design process.

Running the Energy Analysis
Using traditional CAD solutions, energy, water and carbon emission analyses can be a daunting process. If it's a 2D solution, either special 3D analysis models are created or manual plan take-offs from the floor plans are done. If it's a 3D solution, building data is extracted from disparate CAD files and then merged into a single input file. In most cases, the data must be massaged for analysis import and then the output has to be "translated" for the designer's consumption.

Now, design and analysis solutions are simplified and run in unison, using a product like Autodesk Revit Architecture and Green Building Studio. Architects use the Web-based analysis service with their building models and can have energy, water and carbon emission results based on local standards for building type, climate and other attributes within minutes. The architect can then modify the building design either in Revit or the Web service and repeat the analyses to see what impact a design change has on the building design's energy and water use, and its carbon emissions.

This straightforward process relies on enormous computational power. Green Building Studio, for example, uses a large network of relational databases containing hourly weather data, design data and regionally relevant libraries of default building characteristics with common energy code baselines.

Win-Win Results
The Green Building Studio Web service and other sustainability analysis tools utilize better information from BIM solutions, minimizing the cost barrier to designing green buildings. This combination provides more accurate energy, water and carbon emission analyses, leading to a more efficient building design and lower operating costs for the owner. Performing these functions in-house, design services become more affordable for the client and positively impact the profitability for the architectural firm. Now, with these new sustainable design analysis tools, project teams have the ability to design a greener building, making BIM a win-win proposition for everyone.

About the Author
John F. Kennedy, senior manager of AEC Sustainable Design at Autodesk, Inc., AIA Allied member, ASHRAE member, and a licensed mechanical engineer, has more than 15 years of experience developing and expanding the market for sustainable building analysis solutions. He has degrees in mechanical engineering with an emphasis on resource sustainability. He presented his resource sustainability thesis to the Clinton administration's Interagency Material and Energy Flow Workgroup in 1997.

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