A statue of the late co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, at the Graphisoft Park in the third district of Budapest on December 21, 2011. It was erected in a science park that hosts several IT companies, including Graphisoft, which Apple has supported since 1984 when Jobs saw it at the annual CEBIT expo in Hannover, Germany. Graphisoft is now a leading company Building Information Modeling Company. (Attlakisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images)

Staples has its “Easy” button, and President Barack Obama wants a “Green” button for solar and wind to speed up the replacement of fossil fuels with clean technology. But peering back through history, things take time to develop—and even longer to perfect. 

Take for instance, nuclear energy. In 1905, Albert Einstein found the evidence for the existence of the atom. It took another forty years and a world war to unleash the atom’s energy in a bomb. It wouldn’t be until 1954 for Russia to bring the first civilian nuclear power plant online in Obninsk, and for the U.S. to launch the world’s first nuclear submarine in the USS Nautilus.

In another anecdote on the same theme, GRAPHISOFT’s Miklós Svéd told me at the Ecobuild Conference in Washington, “The snowboard took ten years to perfect,” from a wood ski with a toe-rope to an aerodynamically designed composite board tailored more for stunts than slopes.

The BIMStorm summit was a conference within a conference at Ecobuild. It featured such leading Building Information Modeling (BIM) companies as GRAPHISOFT, as well as several universities lecturing on BIM student teams in real-world applications. 

One of them was Cal Poly’s Construction Management professor Elbert Speidel, who commented GRAPHISOFT’s industry-leading program ArchiCAD. He said the program was user friendly, and “My students became proficient with this software in less than a quarter and produced better drawings than many architects.”

GRAPHISOFT’s rapid development

From GRAPHISOFT’s founding by Gabor Bojár in 1982 Budapest, Hungary, in less than a decade, the company grew into one of the top BIM vendors for architects in the world. The BIM movement began with Mr. Bojár as the graphics originator in what he called at the time “virtual building modeling.”

Mr. Svéd explained, “Bojár and his team were hired to create the 3-D digital model of the first nuclear power plant in Hungary. He knew first hand how siloed and fragmented design-build projects were. He saw how difficult the situation was for producing drawings in 2-D. Technology couldn’t produce executed drawings. So Gabor thought, ‘Why not try to build the project in a 3-D model.’ This became the core idea behind BIM.”

He said GRAPHISOFT’s introduction to the world came by the way of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. 

“Jobs went to a computer fair (CEBit) in Germany to show his stuff,” Svéd said. “He saw GRAPHISOFT and realized, like Apple, it wasn’t taken seriously at the time. But ArchiCAD became one of the very first ‘professional’ applications for the Macintosh. The breakthrough came when Jobs introduced GRAPHISOFT to Apple’s global supply chain. The liberation point out of Communist Hungary for GRAPHISOFT came in large part to Steve Jobs.”

Today, GRAPHISOFT sells in 100 countries, in 26 localized versions, and is a dominant player in Europe.

Miklos Svéd joined GRAPHISOFT as its product manager of sustainable design during the 2008 economic crunch. He left his architecture business and misses the creative flow of design. But with 3-D modeling of GRAPHISOFT’s BIM suite of products, design is only a click away.

The growth today in GRAPHISOFT is the development and rapid deployment of ArchiCAD updates and releases. But it’s also integrating the next mission critical phase of design and constructability. That’s building energy modeling (BEM). 

Race for energy modeling

GRAPHISOFT’s answer to the BEM initiative, how to seamlessly integrate and forecast the effects of all the variables that weather, sunlight, shading, climate, and the ground play on a structure, is the next wave of development for this firm and its competitors. It’s called EcoDesigner.

“Coming up with an energy solution in steady state method is one thing,” Svéd pointed out, “but the move now is to a more advanced solution in the dynamic state method. This is key for structural engineering analysis.”

He showed a demo of the new EcoDesigner version—a prototype that will be released next year—saying, “The most important part is indoor air quality, energy and atmosphere.”

He swiveled a color-coded 3-D house model 180 degrees, and pealed away sections of the ground under the foundation to see the affect of the soil’s thermal properties on the interior building.

“Workflow,” he emphasized, “is key to BEM. Concentrate part of the solution to produce energy models. Everyone else uses separate models from BIM to BEM. Some features for EcoDesigner are auto markup of different structures and aggregate lists directly from BIM.”

Mr. Svéd said “Early changes in design have a huge impact on the performance of buildings, which update automatically, to nail down the optimal solution. The ‘structures’ list (specifications or energy calculation input) populates information and then rearranges them to produce list of quantities.”

EcoDesigner is able to open electronic libraries of catalogs for “openings”—windows, doors, storefronts—and run lists of similar BIM fenestrations, a family of windows, along with glazing properties and requirements.

“From this integration, EcoDesigner delivers the data in easy-to-use user interface. Architects are designers, they are artists,” Svéd said.

The challenges for BIM are twofold. Over the next 5-6 years develop a true BEM integration and to provide dynamic energy simulation methods swiftly. 

Mr. Svéd explained with another demonstration, “Energy modeling is good, but not good enough today on a 250,000 SF project. Other building energy simulation software
take a full day on the fastest processors to calculate all the variables on this size building to produce an accurate energy model. EcoDesigner does it faster, while using hourly weather data on local areas.”

EcoDesigner takes the history of hourly calculation input, like what the climate was yesterday to today. The accuracy of the energy model is verified against 98 test cases. The demonstration on the prototype took less than ten seconds to compute. 

He said, “The next five years will be interesting in terms of development of BEM. There are three different rapidly developing fields of physics that will usher in the next phase of building design and construction. Dynamic energy model. Capture fluid dynamics for airflow. Simulation of solar radiant energy and daylighting.”

With those words he showed the building model of a sphere with warped shapes—not a box structure—saying, “Test projects such as the torso image model challenges our information and energy modeling programs to be in top shape before release.”

The old construction adage that a change in design phase costs a project $1 per unit, same change during fabrication $100 dollars, and in the field $1,000, it’s little wonder why architects, engineers, and contractors share an affinity for BIM and BEM. 

Project stakeholders can now avoid month-long coordination meetings of various trades to see what pipe, duct, and conduit fit into what spaces above ceilings. In an industry of shrinking margins, there’s a real opportunity to design and build projects more efficiently for less.

James Ottar Grundvig is a writer living in New York City.