BIM in Façade Design: Real World Examples

The following post is an excerpt from Technological Changes Brought by BIM to Façade Design.

Phoenix International Media Center

Phoenix International Media Center, located at the southwest corner of Beijing Chaoyang Park, with gross floor area of 65,000 square meters and building height of 55 meters, was designed by Beijing Institute of Architectural Design.

The overall design logic is to wrap the main, independently-maintainable space with an ecologically-functional shell, rendering a building-in-building form. There is some interesting shared and public space in between, so as to meet the purpose of public involvement and experience and environmental protection.

In addition to media office and studio production facilities, there is also lots of interactive experience space open to the public, so as to reflect the unique open business concept of Phoenix Media.

To show the uniqueness, culture, and rationality of technology and cost, the architects creatively proposed for the outer surface of the center a flake-type, unit-combined façade fabrication of which either two of the 5,180 units are different from each other.

Phoenix International Media Center

Barclays Center

Barclays Center, covering an area of 675,000 feet, designed by SHoP Architects, reflects the balance between unique shape and good performance.

Click to tweet: “Barclays Center, by SHoP Architects,
reflects the balance of unique shape & good performance.”

Its complex, weather-resistant steel and glass façade design, a main part of arena design, was fulfilled by SHoP Construction (SC) cooperating with a façade contractor.

To ensure the “grille” division of the weather-resistant steel can accurately show the building shape, SC introduced an integrated construction process directly oriented to assembly and applied digital fabrication technology to assemble and deliver 900 large unit panels by sequence, which consisted of 12,000 weather-resistant steel grilles of different sizes.

Barclays Center